The first time Dad visited us in our new house, we were walking around together talking about the various things we had plans for. One of the these was a desire to remove the carpet and the vinyl flooring underneath it in the living room/TV room and replace it with matching hardwood to what we found under the carpet in the family room/fireplace room. At this point, Dad did a very smart thing. He pulled out one of the AC vents and inspected the edge of the existing hardwood flooring we hoped to match.
“Well that’s not going to work. Your floor is too thin”. Indeed it is. I had just assumed that a house build in the mid-30’s would have a 3/4” thick floor, but for some reason, this is not. From one perspective, this is a relief. I don’t have to feel bad about tearing it out, since it is too thin to refinish. And I don’t have to try to match it, now, either. On the other hand, though.. it just feels awful to tear out an old floor.
I found an odd lot of some 3/4” thick Brazilian Koa (it’s not really.. they just call it that) at Lumber Liquidators. It’s full of some damaged pieces and lots and lots of short pieces. I’m a tad nervous about it. That is an understatement. The truth is, though, that we can’t really afford to do what we really want to do.
I really like the look of wide plank mixed-width flooring. This is white pine. It’s grown, harvested, and milled right here on the East Coast. But at $6-9 sq ft, it’s not in our near (or not-so-near) future. At $2.45 a sq ft, though, we could swing the cost for the nearly 1200 sq ft of the stuff we bought from Lumber Liquidators.
I decided to rip up a chunk of the flooring in an out-of-the-way corner so that I could transfer all the new flooring into the house.
Ugh. This process is not fun. I did find this on the bottom of a few of the flooring remnants.
So now I at least know a little bit more of the history of my current flooring. After a few hours of work, I had a section cleared, de-nailed, and cleaned up. The next morning, a friend helped me unload the trailer and get it in the house.
A few days later, I attacked another section of the floor. These nails suck. I have spent enough time crouching and shuffling about the room to qualify as an Old Bay Crab.
When I was done, I cleaned it up with my venerable shop vac. Which may have been pointed into the fireplace when I turned it on. And may have then sprayed fireplace ash all over the whole room. And consequently the cleanup may have taken about an hour. sigh.
