This Floor Really Sucks.....

Ok, so how many of you are thinking that this post is really about me screwing up the parlor floor and that is the only reason you clicked on this post? You should all realize by now that the odds of that happening are pretty slim these days. Ha! Fooled you all! What I am meaning to say is that this floor really sucks up the linseed oil!

This parlor room was added on to between 1887 and 1892 when Herman Volkenand bought the place and was Victorianising it to his liking before he moved into the house. To those whacky Volkenands, the solution was to put down new floor boards butted against the old ones. That was fine except that the old boards are ash and the new boards are yellow pine. When I perform my shellac magic on this floor, the ash boards will come out amber in color and if I am good, the pine boards will look like they do in this picture. They are the boards on the far half of the room. Otherwise, they will be very orange. I can always tint the shellac as a last resort.
This picture was taken tonight after the day was spent sanding the floor repairs and the baseboards. Then vacuuming, lots of vacuuming. This is how it looks after a coat of linseed oil/paint thinner mix and gives you an idea of how it will look when finished. It would be stupid to stain this floor because the difference in the woods would be more pronounced.




If you look carefully you can see my repairs. The big snafu was using a board from the second floor to repair a termite damaged board near the right window. When I did flooring repairs on this place a couple of years ago, I used boards from the second floor hall and bathroom to replace damaged or missing boards of similar width (the floor boards are not equal widths) on the first floor. All the wood was covered in shellac or crud so it wasn't until the floors got sanded that we noticed a distinct dark color on the second floor planks! In this room I only used the one board and it won't stand out when the floors are done so I won't have to paint it or mask it in any way. There are some repairs in the center of the room too. There used to be a big plywood square where a heating grate once rested and there were two electrical boxes in the floor when this building was apartments and there was a walk in/through closet in this room.
You can tell where the floor rug was! Actually, once we put a rug down you won't notice the wood floor. Your eyes will draw to the rug. We realized this when we put the rug down in our bedroom (the room above this one) where the difference in wood flooring is more noticable. Although it is kind of annoying to have the floor this way there is one great advantage. When sanding it I was able to start in the center and work towards the walls. This eliminates the ridge that forms about two feet from the wall where you put the sander down and start walking. I should have this floor finished by next weekend. Then I stop work on this room for a while and get to work on the laundry room and put a beadboard ceiling on the balcony. Oh lucky me......


P.S. Did you notice that the grafitti is gone? Three coats of Killz couldn't thwart it. It took a coat of shellac to entomb it forever in the walls! Now I have to hide the shellac marks and one coat of Killz hasn't quite done it.....