Area Floors Finally Repaired!

Here's a quick picture post of the hardwood floors in our main rooms-- we intended to have this part done before we moved in 3 1/2 years ago, but better late than never!

Even after herculean efforts stripping off green paint, the living room floor was such a patchwork of previous owner asshattery that it couldn't be salvaged in situ.


Flooring torn out of living room, biggest holes in subflooring patched


Professionals laying new white oak flooring in living room (so Area Wife won't have the house taken apart for a year)




New living room floor abutting original dining room floor


A piece of the original white oak flooring from 1925


Fun pulling the nails out of all the old floorboards...


Some sanding, fruitwood stain and 3 coats of oil based polyurethane later, and the new living room floor is finished along with the original flooring in the dining room and hallway.

Quite a change from what it looked like when we first moved in, with laminate glued over the old painted flooring in the hallway, and cheap white carpeting hiding the rest of the mangled floors...


So the new wood doesn't take stain exactly like the 85 year old wood, but we're very pleased with the results. (Not to mention relieved to have it finally done!!!)




Closeup of transition to dining room floor-- the multi-clored boards at the top are the results of my feathering in old boards salvaged from the living room to patch a big hole from old ductwork in the dining room.


Here's the living room/hall transition


And here's all our furniture crammed into the office for 2 weeks!


Area kitty enjoying the new floor


Gratuitous picture of preying mantis eggsac affixed to a shrub in the back yard


Mom counting cross-stitches


Mom & dad trying out our favorite neighborhood walking trails

Area summer...

Just a few photos of where we are right now with the house improvements:

The oak flooring is all nailed in to the no-longer-stinky room, though we still have all the sanding and finishing yet to do.


I was at a standstill with the floor project, trying to decide how to proceed next, when our neighborhood got hit hard by some leftover winds from hurricane Ike, and we ended up without electricity for 10 days! Ugh!

Luckily it's back on now. And the silver lining to the windstorm crisis was all the firewood we salvaged from street corners-- I managed to carry it all up our hill and now we're hurriedly sawing and splitting it so it will be ready to use this winter!! Here's the first almost-cord we've got done so far:





Oh, and we're collecting all that wood for the lovely new wood burning stove we had installed into our fireplace last month!! Woohoo!!



Lastly, here's a gratuitous photo of happy Tom
:)

Stinky Room Update

I'm finally working on the house again and some of the neighbors have been dropping by to see what I'm up to. In the process they've supplied some partial answers to the mystery of the stinky room:

(To briefly recap, we originally thought our office room had a pet urine odor problem, but because the house had been a rental that ended badly with a lot of damage and other problems, we were anxious to find out the source of the odor and rule out the possibility of meth lab contaminants which can have a similar smell). From what I can now piece together from the recollections of neighbors, the last renters had a dog that they left in the house (along with most of their belongings and a huge amount of garbage) for a number of weeks after they and other various people staying there had moved out. Someone was coming by to feed the dog, but for weeks no one was cleaning up after it! It appears that our "office" room and the adjacent half-bath was the poor dog's lavatory during that time, and the floors (and whatever furniture was there) were completely soaked.

Ugh! I'm honestly amazed that the owner was able to clean up and hide the odor to the point where we didn't notice it until we had been in the house for a week or two. (And then of course once we removed the carpet it was much, much worse). Anyway, it's a relief to finally know the source of the stench.

Now, on to getting rid of the smell.... here's a series of photos illustrating our progress so far:

Here's the stinky floor last fall before demolition:

It's really amazing old growth pine-- most pieces were 14 feet long, from one wall to the other!


(The white parts seem to be spackle that someone used to fill in the worst of the termite damage before carpeting over it).


I had a plumber help me take out the toilet & vanity in the half-bath, and then I started chiseling up the laminate flooring in that room. (I tried using a hot iron to soften the glue which helped a little, but most of the laminate still came out in splinters, leaving most of the glue on the pine boards below).

Here's the room with 2/3 of the pine flooring pulled up. (Ignore that rectangle of parquet-- it's just on a piece of plywood that I pulled up from the living room, and I'm using it to keep from falling through the floor as I work).

In spite of the smell, I pulled the nails from the best pieces of flooring and found a brave soul via freecycle with more outdoor storage space than me who took them away to try to treat and re-use them. (:D *is happy to be saving trees*)

so.... with the flooring out, guess what? The room still reeked! So I'm currently busy replacing the most damaged (and stinkiest) pieces of subflooring.

So yeah, at this point I realize it would have been faster to have torn out all the subflooring and replaced it with particle board. D'oh! But I'm almost done and blessedly it smells MUCH BETTER and the remaining odor seems to be localized to a few of the really squishy boards I still have to replace!!

Here is the stinky subflooring I cut out waiting to go to the curb:



*waves goodbye to our stench* (I hope!) With luck I'll be nailing in the new flooring this week. :)

Area July Blogged Belatedly

Oops, I can't believe how long I've managed to neglect the blog! Here's the first of several catch-up posts, (I hope). First, here's what happened with the floor repairs and the garden:

In July I used a birthday gift-card to buy plants for the back yard!



We got a Japanese maple (near the center) and a lot of ferns and perennials (that don't show up so well in the photo). This area was long-neglected and filled in with invasive honeysuckle and garlic mustard when we moved in. Tom cleared the worst weeds and I've hauled countless bags of peat and mulch up the hill and into the back garden, so hopefully the soil is on its way towards being a little less cement-like, and by next year when these plants fluff up it might start looking like something. :)

Also in July I finished adding new flooring and sub-flooring to repair the hole in the dining room.



We tried out a couple shades of finish for the floor on some scrap pieces of flooring, and the tinted shellac layers (covered by water-based polyurethane) look like they will do a pretty good job of hidinig the differences in grain between the brand new unfinished oak boards and the 80 year old boards. (Here's the test strip sitting on top of the repaired area. The top two rows are new boards and the bottom rows are old. The left side has 3 coats of walnut-tinted garnet dewaxed shellac, and the right side has 2-- I think we're going to end up going with just 2).



However.... I decided the rest of the floor repairs and refinishing are just going to have to wait until I see the overall condition of the living room floors (i.e., liberate them from underneath all that green paint), and see how many of the original floorboards I can salvage for patching the holes. My method of feathering the new floorboards in with the old in the dining room was successful enough, but WAY too tedious and time-consuming to ever use again! (And coming from me, that's saying a lot!)