Some More of My Floor

The floor pictured in the previous post looks good but I want to say it is not perfect. Most people don't go around examining floors for flaws but many folks have indicated that they were inspired by how well they turned out and it gives them hope for their own floors. Some of the boards have deep divots due to the splintering dry wood and since this was obviously a problem for the owner of the property who painted the floors battleship grey back in the 1950s, in some of the grey painted areas the paint didn't sand out completely. Some of the deep red color didn't come out either. Here is a close up of one of the boards that illustrates this;

I made the decision to refinish the wood instead of paint the floors based on the fact that they had turned out satisfactory after sanding. They also look quite rustic and have old house character. I did not use stain on this floor. I used shellac for the color and then applied two coats of polyurethane over the shellac except on some of the divots I have had to apply 4 or 5 coats of poly in order to reduce the chance of some areas splintering. The build up of poly on the rough edges of the splinters reduces the roughness of the wood on these edges. Another thing that gives the floor character are the plugs I made for where the floor boxes were:



I couldn't match the wood since I don't have any scraps from this floor and you don't know what color they will turn out until you put shellac on them. I will be mounting external boxes onto the baseboards and the wires should be hidden by the shoe molding. I have to paint the baseboards first, though.

Here is how the adjacent room turned out after a coat of oil based KILLZ primer:

Now for the big clean up. There is a lot of dust in this house!