Submitted by Larocque3d t3_xt897l in DIY
I have bought an older home and have been hard at work doing renos. The house had been built almost entirely out of cedar. Floorboards are tongue and groove cedar plank UNDER the subfloor plywood. I have been ripping the plywood off and sanding down the cedar to act as my floor. But there are quite a few areas that have pretty deep divots. They knew it would be under the subfloor so they didn't care much about the finish of the top of the boards.
Here are some of the real bad spots: https://imgur.com/a/9BTJrVH
I've done some looking around. I thought about doing an epoxy to fill the gaps and grooves. But I hear never to do that as the flexing and swelling of the boards over the year would make the epoxy crack and ruin the whole floor. So should I even be trying to fill these gaps or just let them be? I worry about chipping as they catch on things over time and splinters as well with kids running around.
UPDATE: Thank you all for the honest responses. This really blew up. I'm glad I made the post. My stubbornness might have led me to something I would have probably regretted so it was good to hear peoples opinions on this. Whether they were for or against. Also some of you really went the extra mile on the info and can't thank you enough.
So I think we are going to give up hope on turning this subfloor into something. It can't be ripped out as this is our residence and with kids and life, we can't really gut and resubfloor. Not to mention nor can we really afford a contractor as this is our first house and we put a lot into it. BC housing is ridiculous right now.
With all that said we plan to fix the dry rot as best we can, put down an underlay, and then put a proper hard wood or engineered hardwood over top running opposite to the current direction. Again, thank you everyone for the responses!
TL;DR Not gonna bother anymore just gonna go hardwood over top.