Saving a Hardwood Floor

Once the wainscot was removed from the piano room we found ourselves starting the renovation again from scratch.  This time we decided to start from the bottom up and began with the floor.

The floor had always been an issue but we had been choosing to ignore it up to this point so I guess it was a good thing that we were forced to do something about it.  If we go back to the original photo of this room you will notice there is a large carpet that has been cut to exactly fit the room, with a one foot border around the perimeter.

Carpeting was custom cut to fit the room

When we first saw this room we were very excited, believing we could pull up the carpet and expose the original hardwood floor underneath.

However, when we pulled the carpet up we found this.

The good news is that it is the original floor.  The boards are narrow, free of knots and very long.  It also has the worn and rolling contours that only years of foot traffic can provide to a floor like this.  The bad news is it had some major problems.

The first issue was that only the perimeter of the floor had been stained.  If we wanted the floor a uniform colour we would have to sand the whole thing and then stain it again.  The second issue was there was a reason the whole floor had not been stained.  When this house had sat vacant for many years there had been water damage and this floor was part of that damage.  Large water spots were visible across the room and numerous boards were actually rotten.  A simple sanding was not going to fix these problems.  To make matters worse the carpet that had been laid down to hide these issues was a real carpet.  Not a rug.  Carpeting has foam backing that provides an extra layer of comfort when fixed to a floor.  However, in this case the carpet was sitting loosely on the floor and had been there many years.  The foam backing had begun to break down and was actually stuck to the floor boards.

Foam from the carpet backing had to be scraped by hand off the hardwood

Our first impression wasn't good.  The floor was not in great condition and required plenty of work to make it usable.  It needed cleaning and sanding.  Rotting boards would have to be replaced.  A new finish would have to be found.  We weren't sure this was the answer.  Floors throughout the house needed replacement and we considered simply ripping this wood out and putting in new floors throughout.  We had some tough questions to answer about what we wanted the house to look like, if we wanted to save this original feature, and what the changes might cost.   A new floor would solve some problems throughout the house but it would also mean losing something we prized, an original hardwood floor.

When looking at homes to buy we had viewed another farmhouse that had painted softwood floors.  We had greatly admired those floors and wondered if we could do the same.  It would cover up the water stains and replacement boards and would add a dash of colour to the room.  If we didn't like the results we could always rip the floor out completely.  We decided to paint.

The first step to prepare the floor was scraping off the bits of foam from the carpeting.  We spent hours with small scrapers completing this job.  Next the rotted boards had to be removed.  This wasn't an easy task to accomplish but luckily Jody is pretty handy with tools and knows a thing or two when it comes to wood.  

You can see where the new boards are in the lower portion of the photo

Individual boards were cut and pried out of the floor.  Then custom cut boards were fitted into the open spaces.  The new boards were very visible when seen next to the old boards.  A simple stain would never have disguised them so paint was a good solution to this issue.  Once the new boards were installed the entire floor was sanded.  This was necessary to remove the stain in preparation for painting but it was also necessary as the newly fitted floorboards literally stuck out from the old boards.  You could feel their newly cut corners with your feet when compared to the smooth contours of the old floor so extra effort was made to sand those edges down.

Then finally we were ready for paint.