Floorboards Restoration – Nails Or Screws
Floorboards Restoration – Nails Or Screws
To keep a wooden floor in good condition, regular cleaning and maintenance are essential. But time is unforgiving, and even the highest-quality surface will eventually need more serious attention — usually floor sanding and a thorough restoration. Unfortunately, if the floor installation underneath isn't properly levelled and stable, sanding is pointless. You have to be sure your floorboards are securely fixed, solid, and free of squeaks before any sanding takes place. Which brings us to the real question behind most creaky, loose floors: should you fix them with nails, or with screws?
To nail or NOT to nail — that is the question
Problems with floorboards can often be traced back to temperature fluctuations and excessive moisture. Cupping, buckling, warping, mould, or gaps between boards are all serious issues that are a real headache to deal with. There are also less severe complications — squeaky and loose floorboards being the most common — and quite often the cause lies in how the boards were fixed in the first place.
Most wooden floors are secured to the joists with nails. It's the traditional method, and it's been used for well over a century. But is it actually the best one?
When a floor goes through repeated cycles of expansion and contraction — which happens constantly with seasonal humidity changes — the wood fibres around a nail shank gradually compress. Nails rely purely on friction to stay put; they have no mechanical grip. Once that surrounding timber compresses enough, the nail loosens in its hole and can start to work its way back up over time. A loose nail gives the board a bit of vertical play, and it's that tiny movement — board rubbing against board, or board rubbing against nail — that produces the classic squeak. The obvious fix? Screw the boards down instead.
So why is nailing still so widespread if it's the weaker option? Simple: it's fast. A pneumatic nail gun can secure a whole room of boards in a fraction of the time it takes to drill pilot holes and drive screws one at a time. If a floor is only ever going into a budget rental refit and no one plans to touch it again, that speed might be a reasonable trade-off. But for anything you intend to look after long-term — or ever lift again for access — it's a false economy.
Nail types, and why they behave differently
Not all nails are equal, and the type used has a real effect on how a floor ages:
Cut flooring nails (also called cut brads) have a tapered, rectangular profile. They bite into the timber grain rather than just compressing it, which gives noticeably better hold than round wire nails — this is what most Victorian and Edwardian floorboards were originally fixed with, and it's a big part of why so many of them are still liftable and re-usable well over a century later.
Lost-head (bullet-head) nails have a small, barely-there head designed to be punched below the surface. They're common on modern reproduction board installs but offer less grip than cut nails.
Secret nailing, where the nail is driven at an angle through the tongue of a tongue-and-groove board, hides the fixing entirely and is still a legitimate method for solid strip flooring — but it only works with T&G profiles, and it still shares nailing's core weakness against seasonal movement.
Glue and screw: the restoration-grade approach
The biggest practical advantage of screws is reversibility. If a screwed board ever needs to come up — during a floorboards restoration project, to fix a subfloor issue, or to run new wiring or pipework beneath the floor — you simply back the screws out and refit the board in exactly the same holes afterwards. Lift a nailed board, on the other hand, and you generally have to punch or snap the nails free, which damages the timber around the old fixing point and means re-nailing in a slightly different spot each time. Do that two or three times over a board's life and you end up with a scarred, weakened joist edge.
Screws also simply hold better. A twin-thread woodscrew, correctly pilot-holed to avoid splitting the timber, pulls the board down tight against the joist and keeps that clamping force through seasonal movement in a way a nail's friction fit can't match. For solid wood floors laid directly onto joists (as opposed to a floating engineered installation), we'd always recommend glue and screw together — the adhesive resists lateral movement between boards, the screw resists vertical lift, and the combination is what genuinely stops squeaks for good rather than just muffling them for a season.
A few practical numbers worth knowing if you're assessing or specifying a fix:
Screw length should generally be around 2–2.5 times the board thickness, so a standard 18–22mm floorboard typically wants a 45–50mm screw.
Always drill a pilot hole first, sized just under the screw's core diameter — skipping this on old, dry timber is the single most common cause of a split board during a repair.
Space fixings roughly every 300–400mm along each joist run, and always fix within 15–20mm of the board edge to avoid splitting.
Appearance: the case for pelleting
Most people don't want visible fixings ruining a freshly sanded finish. Left exposed, nail heads stay a visible, slightly rusty-looking feature forever — unless secret nailing was used from the outset. Screws give you more finishing options. A countersunk screw head can be filled flush with a gap-filling resin so it more or less disappears into the board.
For period and higher-spec restorations, there's a step up from resin filler worth knowing about: pelleting. The screw is countersunk slightly deeper than usual, and a small timber pellet — cut from an offcut of the same species and grain direction as the board — is glued into the recess over the screw head, then sanded flush. Done well, a pelleted fixing is almost invisible even under a clear finish, because you're matching timber to timber rather than covering a metal head with resin. It costs more time than a resin fill, but on parquet and quality solid boards it's the difference between a repair that shows and one that doesn't.
When nails still make sense
Screws aren't automatically right for every situation. On a like-for-like reproduction of a period floor, or in a listed building where conservation guidance calls for traditional materials and methods, cut nails may be specified precisely because that's how the floor was originally built, and mixing fixing types can look inconsistent under an inspection light or raking sunlight. Nailing can also be the practical choice for a quick, non-critical fix on boards that are unlikely to ever need lifting again — a small section under a fitted wardrobe, for instance, where access isn't a future concern.
Choosing the right screw
Once you've settled on screws, there's a secondary decision: fully threaded, or partially threaded with a smooth shank near the head? A screw threaded all the way to the top gives slightly better overall holding power and resistance to timber movement, but it also grips the top piece of timber as well as the joist, which makes it marginally harder to back out cleanly if you need to lift the board again later. A partially threaded screw, by contrast, lets the shank pass freely through the board while the thread bites only into the joist — pulling the board down tighter and making future removal a little easier. For most floorboards restoration work, we lean towards partially threaded screws for exactly that reason.
Quality matters more than people expect here too. Cheap, low-grade screws snap under torque far more easily than a decent-quality twin-thread screw, especially once the pilot hole wasn't sized quite right or the timber is old and dense. A screw head that shears off mid-drive is awkward and time-consuming to remove, and can end up doing more damage to the board than the original problem you were fixing. It's a small cost difference for a much lower chance of having to start the repair over.
One thing to flag before sanding
If you're planning to sand a floor that was fixed with nails, check every visible or suspected nail head before the machine goes anywhere near it. Any nail sitting proud of the surface — even by a millimetre — will tear the sanding belt or drum and can gouge the board. Punching every nail head a few millimetres below the surface first is a standard, necessary prep step, and it's one of the reasons an accurate floorboards restoration survey always includes a check of how the boards were originally fixed, not just their surface condition.
