The teak and holy at the base of our ladder was shot. trying to patch in new teak and holy would have looked like,,,a patch job and replacing the entire sole would have been more that I was up to. My solution was to remove just the bad section and replace the plywood with a new piece of 1/4 inch looane(spelling) with linolium glued to it. This came out better than we expected. It is brighter, more durable, easy to clean, easy to install, and much cheaper than replacing the entire sole.Don Bodemann