A few days after closing on the home, We had our floor guy come take a look at what he was going to tackle. We are very ambitious home owners and really wanted to get things rolling, however we knew we couldn’t do much until the floors were done. This was why we didn’t move anything into the home until the floors were complete.
We used a floor guy that my parents had used on their 1912 farmhouse floors. He does beautiful restoration work. He’s a one man show and so we knew we’d be supporting a local contractor instead of a giant corporation. Support local people!
Our floors had a lovely shade of orange stain that felt tacky and sticky on your feet. I’m sure this is a result of moisture breaking down the lacquer that was on the floors underneath that beautiful lime green shag carpet. I pulled nails out of this floor for what seemed like weeks once we had the carpet completely out.
notice the orange sheen on the floors
My hands were sore for weeks after this process. However, we wanted to prep the floors as much as possible to save on cost with the floor restoration. Lets not forget 3000 sq ft of floor restoration can get a little costly. Well I suppose it wasn’t that much considering we can’t include the 3 bathrooms and kitchen so lets guess 2500 sqft ish? Still a lot.
It took Chad a couple weeks to get the first floor ready for restoration. First he had to do a couple repairs and patches. We had a large patch that had been done most likely by the previous homeowner between the dining room and living room. It needed to be redone. It didn’t match up and was a total hack job. I learned in the process that this is no easy task so I can see why the previous patcher had trouble repairing this hole. We know that this hole was a fireplace patch. This is such a bummer considering a victorian home would have had multiple fireplaces and ours only has one. The rest of them have been removed. Just like in this floor patch. We know it was a fireplace because under this floor down in the basement, the chimney is still there.
pulling boards up to repair the patch
floor patch
They ended up using floor boards for the living room (wide plank pine) from the attic. They were in perfect condition up there, and the same flooring used throughout the house. The striped floor in the dining room wasn’t as easy. Chad ended up using maple from a gym floor that he salvaged somewhere along his journey of floor restoration, and historic walnut that had also been salvaged from some other place. It was important to use old wood so the patina wasn’t lost once the flor was sanded and stained.
This whole process definitely sucked. We couldn’t bring any furniture into the house, even when he was complete. We hosted Skylers 5th birthday party days after he had finished staining the floors, but stayed completely outside. Complete with the piano on a rolling cart in the middle of the kitchen, since we had to have that out of the way for him to work on the floors. Nothing like hosting a birthday party with your piano in the middle of the kitchen. There was no walking on floors. Thankfully since we have two staircases to get upstairs, we were able to get up there with the use of the butlers staircase from the kitchen, so we didn’t have to walk across the house on our beautiful “new” stained floors.
parlor looking into living room
parlor
no more weird patch!
This whole process was very difficult. We couldn’t use our first level, and couldn’t walk on the floors for days after they were done. We also couldn’t put anything on them furniture wise for 10 days post staining. We lived completely upstairs, because we did this in two phases. He worked completely downstairs for the first session, and then came back a few weeks later to complete the upstairs. We had a TON of work to do upstairs to get it ready for him but that’s a whole separate post.
yay! Slowly bringing in furniture
living room
We couldn’t have been more pleased with the way our floors turned out. It made the space feel large, clean, and fresh. The smell from the stain was bad but so worth it. Chad did an amazing job, however I’d rather never go through this experience again. Well worth it, but a month of waiting to move things in was SO hard!
