Andy and I have been working intermittently on the floor in the Blue Room (proper noun, as the wallpaper commands it).
This is one of the original rooms, and it contains some great features, like the trim, high ceilings, and windows. The original flooring is still intact, although the fireplace was removed decades ago (not sure who did that, but I'd like to poke them in the eye with my staple puller). The last owners put down thin oak flooring, maybe 1/4 inch, around the edges of the room -- not the whole room, mind you, just the edges. If you're going to cover it with a rug, why bother finishing? It was a theme.
Former owners did leave us an ancient blue Persian rug, but the pattern-on-pattern was a little too much to stomach. It's currently in the garage, fate TBD (sell or clean and use).
Here's what we started with. As you can see, they had carpet pads in the hole, original subfloors under that, and then the oak flooring around the edges. Most of the subfloor was bare wood, but there were multiple layers of finish and paint on the rest.
An oak shelf inserted into the trim! Pure delight. Smacks of crystal dolphins and maybe some rag dolls.
!!!
We finally got all the flooring around the edges pulled up, which was no easy feat. If you have a hardwood floor, do me a favor and go look at it for a minute. How many nails are in each board? 2, maybe 4? Makes sense. Each of these tiny boards had AT LEAST 20 nails in them. Former owners also stapled down the carpet pad in about forty different places (despite it being in a giant hole).
These people could have invested their nail money into Microsoft stock and become billionaires.
Sidebar: Andy bought a bike trainer.
Sanding away.
Everything is coated in lead, so we're trying to be really careful with respirators and goggle-wearing. Also, the old dust and god-knows-what-else stenches are pretty overpowering. It's nice to think of Grandpa Calvert kicking back in his rocker with three packs of unfiltered Camels, but I kind of wish he had smoked in the barn.
Respirator selfie.
I wiped off all the lead dust today and scrubbed the floor (Lemon was intensely interested, having been banned from the room for a couple of weeks).
Next up, painting!
That's so bizarre! So under the narrow oak flooring around the edge was the wider plank flooring? Did you have to install new flooring in the hole? We just put in some hardwoods on our landing (re-doing our stairs which were wall-to-wall carpeted) and Dave used a zillion nails, top-nailed, to match what they did in the rest of the house. Someone will be cursing us someday.
ReplyDeleteI think they started putting in the oak flooring to cover up the fireplace patch job and then (a) didn't feel like finishing or (b) didn't have the money to buy more flooring and someone gave them a Persian rug. So, there was no hole per se, just a lower area in the floor that wasn't covered in the oak flooring. I've never seen anything like it.
ReplyDeleteI think I like the way it looks now that you have uncovered it. Are you sure you don't want to put on a clear finish and keep the vintage look of the old boards?
ReplyDeleteIt looks a lot worse in person; it's pretty discolored from being painted and refinished so many times (there are sections of board that look yellow/green). Eventually we're going to put in a different floor that looks the same through the whole house. There's no insulation under the existing floor, so it would be very expensive to keep it as is (heating) and no great way to insulate under it without ruining what's already there.
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