amber waves of pine

The floors in the nursery/future master bath have been done for a month or so now, and they managed to become the longest single project in working on the space.  Longer than running the plumbing.  Longer than building (and unbuilding and rebuilding) walls.  Longer than stripping the woodwork.  Longer even than restoring the windows.

Yikes.

The story of the floors began when we bought the house.  Despite the absence of working roofs, plumbing or electrical, the bank decided that they also required us to finish the floors on the second floor under the terms of the 203k.  In this room, the floor was a mix of layers including vinyl sheet flooring, cat piss, 9 inch asbestos checkerboard tile, cat piss, two layers of marble contact paper, cat piss, black linoleum adhesive, cat piss, and the original faux grained painted border.  The cat piss issue is important since it almost caused us to walk away from the deal.  While the whole house was fairly saturated with urine, this room was by far the worst since it had the most exposed bare wood.  The first few inspections the weather was quite cold and wet and the smell/moisture wasn't obvious.  However, on the final walk through it was warm and dry and we could immediately see the wet pervading the floors - we thought we must have another leak from a mystery source until I put my nose to it....

So, we stripped the floor, did a quick sand and many soaks with the various urine destroying solutions and three coats of waterlox (not sufficient on pine, just enough to make them look doneish for the bank).  Now the intention was to be able to come back later, scuff sand the floor and put of a few more coats of waterlox.  The reality is that my roofer decided I was not capable of sanding the floors on my own and did me the enormous favor of coming in with his edger and sanding the edges - gauging them so badly that fixing them to be level with the rest of the floor would take off half the sandable wood.  So that's how they sat for 3 years.

At 8 months pregnant the room was done enough for me to revisit the floor, so I conned my friends into carrying the big ez sand  machine up the stairs for me and joyously got to work.  Only to stop 10 minutes later after realizing the machine had a metal burr on one of the sanding pad bases that etched curlicues deep into my pine.  I may have cried.  I swear it wasn't the hormones.

The manager at Home Depot did what he could to help the crazy pregnant woman, and ended up giving me over $100 dollars worth of sanding disks for my handheld Dewalt because I decided I was going to do the floors BY HAND.  I almost finished them too, and then Toren arrived two weeks early.  

After a month and a half of recovery I was ready to revisit the floors.  The room had been locked up, covered in sawdust, with our closet tarped off (yes, we had no access to our closet for two months when we had planned on a week).  Finished the 80, did the 120, spent two days dental picking the gaps between the boards and vacuuming and was finally ready for Waterlox 2.0.

It went down beautifully.  And there is much evidence of the whole menagerie memorialized in the floor... The first two coats are Minwax red oak and dark walnut (8 oz each in a gallon of waterlox), with three more coats of straight waterlox.  And given I was doing this with windows open in early December I think I owe global warming a big thank you!

december updates

Truly I meant to start up again before now, but then my computer started smoking...

Luckily, it had the good sense to die on cyber Monday, so a replacement was easy to come by.  I'm well past the point of being excited by electronics though, so the expenditure was nothing but aggravating.  It's hard not to calculate the things I won't be able to work on around here so that I'm able to keep typing...

Since last we spoke we've:

a.  planted many of the bulbs bought for us in the Netherlands - some of which have already emerged given this crazy weather

b.   cured the hatch to the widow's walk of an obnoxious little leak.  This allowed us to weatherstrip the attic hatch (compressible gasket on top of the quarter round the hatch rests on) and reinstall it, finishing up the attic work at last.  I had intended to paint the hatch before putting it back up, but some chips revealed that it was originally shellacked, and the beadboard looks worth restoring.  That'll wait till spring, but I did put on some nice reproduction Eastlake hardware to make handling it much easier (it's remarkably heavy).

c.  hosted Thanksgiving and HAMukkah 2.0 with great success, while managing to forget the 5 year anniversary of owning the house.

d.  restored and rewired another chandelier better suited to the scale of the dining room (the vintage fixture that was there will grace another room).

as close to the correct glow as I could photograph

e.  have read more books in just the past 2 months than in the previous year, best among them?  High Fidelity, which is impossible to read and not envision John Cusack narrating and The Time Traveler's Wife, with shockingly excellent music and Arts and Crafts references.

f.  put up a bit more siding on the schoolhouse.

g.  finally finished the floors in the nursery/future master bath, full details will be forthcoming...

h.  got rid of 2 1/2 trees worth of logs to a friend for his woodburner.  We're seeing some evidence of ground termites, which is forcing us to start rounding up our stray woodpiles.  In return for the free wood they helped us move the last salvaged radiator to the basement, and there's a chance for free BBQ if the restaurant wants the sassafras for smoking...

i.  managed to keep an infant alive for two whole months!

let there be heat

No posts last week, I know.  But I was too busy finishing up what I needed to for our radiators to go back in.  Then, I sort of got sucked into just lounging about in the warmth.  Having heat is just so very decadent....

In our defense, it had gotten pretty damn chilly around here...

We pulled these two radiators about a month ago under the pretense of accessing the floors and trim.  Having them out of the way also meant that we could reinforce the floors underneath them and caulk all the gaps, as they had begun to weaken and deteriorate with the water moving through the walls before we bought the house.  Thankfully, the wood, though black from the water, didn't need replacement.  Even though it doesn't look the greatest, it'll never be seen again now that the rads are back.

terrible before pic, but you get the idea
that's brick on the right where the plaster had failed

Since our plumbing company (Chuba for the locals) had given us a quote we couldn't refuse, we let them do the heavy lifting (the radiators are 4 feet long and 2 1/2 feet tall).  Price-wise, removing and re-installing two radiators as well as installing a new pressure relief valve on the boiler ran us two hundred dollars.  Although we could have done it ourselves, for that price I was happy to hand over the money.  We put some plywood down to reinforce our rotten porch so the radiators didn't fall though, and decided to paint them while we were at it (they looked terrible, peeling silver on one side and substantial surface rust on the other (sooo much water in this house!))....  They got pressure washed, the worst spots wire brushed, and painted with many, many coats of Rustoleum's antique brass spray paint.  I even remembered to tape off the threading and bleeders.

And now they're in, the boiler's working, and I can worry about finishing up the woodwork.

I'd like to pretend I don't have any more deadlines, but there's only one reason Luke would be this cute...

I think he may have overheard that we're getting a puppy come Thanksgiving....

wood grain goodness

So the floor?  Done...

It's lovely.  Although it's too cold to go roll around in the grass outside, I'll just lounge about on this expanse of pine.

Sadly, it's not an exact match to the original graining - I didn't have enough time to experiment with the technique given our tight deadline, so the color ended up a tad dark with a less distinct grain. Truthfully this resulted in a more realistic looking floor, but it's still regrettable.  Even more so since I have to carry this through to the dining room, hallway and butlers pantry.  I had planned on writing a bit of a tutorial for getting the grain right since it's such a common treatment, but there's no point given my failure...  What we ended up using was red elm gel stain as the glazing medium over the gold paint, cutting it with mineral spirits if it got too thick.  Every graining tool I tried to use made lines that were too thin.  After trying everything I could think of I ended up buying a silicone basting brush.  It worked, don't judge me.

I was just the girl sitting on the floor of her entry room with all the curtains open flogging the floor with a basting brush for 10 hour stretches...

The cold and damp weather was the biggest hurdle to getting this done.  The stain took three days to dry enough for the poly, and in that time an enormous amount of shiba inu and ragdoll hair embedded themselves in the thick goo.  Unlike debris in poly, I couldn't just sand it out.

the fuzzy culprits...

OBVIOUSLY his nose was cold...

 So, I chose to ignore it.  Three coats of poly over the last three days and the floors are done.  I used varathane semi-gloss (semi-gloss matches the gloss of the waterlox I use elsewhere) to protect the paint, and while normally I'm not a big fan of poly, this looks pretty damn good.  The can advertises it's "aluminum oxide nano technology," which I would normally mock, but given how even the first coat resisted being sanded, maybe I'll give it a pass...

who's got the pox....

Just a bit of the pox.

But we're feeling much better now....

do you want fries with that?

I wasn't kidding when I said I was committed to restoring the original rift sawn oak faux bois finish on the library floors....
















As proof of my dedication, I present to you my Golden Arches mustard floors.

I had hoped to have to do the finish from scratch only on the middle, unpainted section of floor, while filling in the worn spots elsewhere.  Since the bonded rosin paper made this impossible, we had to decide between painting everything, or sanding to bare wood and waterloxing.  While I love the pine, it does suggest a slightly rustic and informal feel - certainly not appropriate for a principle room downstairs.  Although a painted floor wouldn't normally strike me as the more formal option, seeing the bits of finish still in good condition, as well as identical floors in other grand houses in the area of similar age, makes me sure of my decision.

Standing, the original finished looked just like rift sawn oak, pictures don't really do the artistry justice.  Also, I have lots of rugs and VERY big furniture.  So if I completely botch this little enterprise, I'll be devastated, but I doubt the rest of the world will notice.  The first step is matching the undercoat...

Easy enough when there's a stray un-grained patch (the triangle in the middle).  Even if there weren't it's easy enough to look at the rays in quartered oak to figure out a good starting point (hint - ignore all reason and good taste and choose the most obnoxious color possible).  The color ended up being the common butterscotch paint you see in many antique homes.  This makes sense if you think of floor finishing on a price schedule, the butterscotch could be painted on, and grained later if the client changed their mind or wanted to pay the additional cost.  In the case of our house, the grained finish border was present in at least 5 of our bedrooms.  Evidence points to original wall to wall carpeting in this room (stray fibers under the baseboards), and tacked down linoleum or carpets in much of the upstairs (many, many tacks pulled up and dug from between floorboards).

To prep for the paint the floors were de-nailed, then scrubbed (mostly in an effort to rid them of rosin paper), then sanded with 40 and 80 grit.  The sanding was just done with an orbital sander taped to my shop vac.  The idea of flattening these floors is a joke, so big sanding equipment wasn't called for.  After sanding I dug out all the cracks with a dental pick, and vacuumed at every stage (vacuuming around here is a lost cause, but I have to at least try to do things right).  Under the base coat of yellow were white and gray primer coats - most likely lead based - and I'd pay a king's ransom to buy more of it on the black market, the stuff is amazingly durable, as is whatever they filled the gaps with (some old timer told me it was tinted linseed oil based glazing putty?).....

After sanding this was where we were at....  Not particularly pretty is it?  Hopefully I can begin to rectify that in a few more days...

beer and pry bars

As soon as the piano left the premises, I got busy ripping up the last of the oak.  The hammer and pry bar were helpful, but I think it was the chai beer from Brew Gentleman, a local microbrewery that helped the process along....

The floor overall was in good shape, the only unpleasant surprise was how potent decades-old urine can be on a humid fall day (all those stains were there for a reason).  It meant that none of those oak boards could be saved, but it seems the enzyme cleaner (and the original paint finish on the pine) should minimize the residual stench.

The bad news is that about 50% of the building paper was fused to the shellac and paint on the floor.  My fingertips are worn to the bone after trying to scrub the paper off (hot water and a green scrubbie), but despite generating many pounds of snot like soggy paper, it's not enough to save the original faux bois finish, so I guess doing a true "restoration" is out.

And despite my best attempts at complete denial, fall is in full swing...

agent orange

At least that's how I felt about the crummy orange oak on the first floor.

badly stained oak on our first walk through

it's easy to forget how much WHITE there was...

It was laid around the time the house was split, presumably to help hide some of the floor plan changes, as well as the then out of fashion pine planks. The discrepancy between it and the original 1880's quartered oak with inlaid mahogany floors makes one wonder how the two woods could have originated from the same type of tree. To add insult to injury, it was laid against the original shoe molding, the same direction as the original floor, and was covered in rather severe stains.

right up against the shoe molding

I removed the first section when we restored the layout of the staircase, before I started the blog. This revealed a discrete patterned landing area that confirmed that I made the right call on how to build the stairs (only off by one inch when all was said and done)!

this was hiding under the oak...

Removing that section showed that it butted up to faux finished pine in the current entry room, which carries through to the dining room.

it'll be so nice to have even floors!

The next section we pulled out was the hallway to the bathroom (in this post here), both of which used to be part of the dining room. I was hoping to find ghost marks of a built-in on the floor, which weren't there. We can now assume that any built-in would have been on the wall that was demolished when the kitchen addition was built in the 1890's. There is some evidence on this section of where the passage from the front parlor to the dining room was, just based on wear, as well as two strange sections I haven't figured out yet. This floor is also faux finished pine, and most likely had wall to wall, or a tacked down central carpet from day one.

The current project is stripping it from the current entry room (eventual library/music room). While the timing is admittedly strange with the (futile) yearly rush to winterize the house and schoolhouse, I have my reasons... Our antique square grand piano is being rented for the Vin Diesel movie "The Last Witch Hunter," which started filming last week. What this means is that professional piano movers will be here to pick it up at the end of the month, and it'll be off being famous for the next three weeks, along with four of my light fixtures. It would be a shame to waste the opportunity to restore the floors while the behemoth is out of the picture. On that note, there had been talk of renting our bed - luckily for my husband that didn't pan out, the fact that Vin Diesel had been in my bed would have remained my default icebreaker small talk until the day I died....

obviously a bed worthy of Riddick...

I've stripped a third of the floor of the oak so far, revealing, as expected, faux finished, random width southern yellow pine just like upstairs. The center is as naked as the day it was installed, just missing it's carpet. What wasn't expected is just what good condition it's in. The only flaws are a slight warp at the wall where the oak had a huge number of stains (likely from the pets of previous owners), one buckled board from the weight of the radiator foot, and the inevitable nail holes from the oak. Surprisingly, the faux finish is in incredible condition as well. It was designed to look like rift sawn oak, and is fairly convincing while you're standing. Although we had it throughout the house upstairs, this has been the only time it's been in good enough condition to get the full effect.

Which leaves me with a decision... We had planned on just sanding and waterloxing, which would look lovely. But now that I see the finish (on this section at least) seems to be restorable, and it's become so rare to see in antique homes, I feel quite obligated to save it. This was put in by a man who could have afforded whatever he wanted for his floors, and he chose to have an artist paint them. If it was good enough for him I feel like it should be good enough for me too...

as it stands now, still need to scrub off the paper stuck to the shellac

So there seems to be three options:

a. sand everything down, stain and waterlox
b. sand only the center, waterlox it and restore the faux finish border
c. try my hand at restoring the faux border, and faux finish the rest of the floor as well

I'm vacillating between all these options, and would really love to hear your ideas! In the meantime, three little discoveries...

See how the building paper jogs in about an inch just past the plinth? This suggests that I was almost dead on in deciding how much to open up the doorway (it had been just a single door when we bought the house). The longer section of paper likely protruded into the original doorway.

The second is more of a question.

See that hole? I can think of only one reason for it's odd location. I've seen historic dining rooms where there was a servant call button on the floor at the head of the table (you would tap it with your foot). The location would be dead on, and this house had speaking tubes and annunciators - BUT, as far as we know this wasn't a dining room. At the same time, we now know that the kitchen wing was an addition, meaning that there's really no reason this couldn't have been the original dining room.

Lastly, proof that there are no new ideas...

"Factory Finished Flooring" Williamsport PA

All the fuss over today's pre-finished floors and it turns out they've been around for a long while. They likely went out of style when people figured out that they offered no protection for spills (or pet accidents) that go right through the joints. I wonder how long it'll take people to figure that out this time around?