The Little Blue House Renovation: Floors Are Important

In writing this I realize I should have dug up the name of the fantastic floor finishing company we discovered to help us with our renovation project. They were the only company that didn't insist that we replace our kitchen floor and for that I will always be grateful. The house had gone through a few stages of renovation, a pretty extensive one in the 1980's as well as a pretty comprehensive one sometime in the 1950's (I know this because some of the built-ins were signed and dated!). As such the house has two main types of wood flooring, something commonly called pumpkin pine and a maple. The entire upstairs was redone in maple sometime in the 1950's and so was the dining room. The dining room was especially interesting because it was finished using salvaged boards, each diverging in width and length as you moved across the floor.

When we decided to refinish the floors we had to make a difficult choice, pull up the pine in the dining room and hope for the best or refinish it as it was. We took the plunge and decided to pull it up. The uneven finish from the salvaged wood was difficult to clean and we hoped that a more uniform first floor, all pine, would look better overall. However we risked finding only subfloor and then being forced to find salvaged pine elsewhere or worse trying to use new flooring which we knew would never really match.

Luckily the pine was still intact under the maple and in really good shape. We also found that the 1950's renovation had altered the house's original floor plan. A cut out from a previous wall that divided the dining room lengthwise was uncovered. The doorway from the kitchen had also been moved slightly to the south. We guessed that this may have been an original butler's pantry that opened directly from the kitchen. The wall was likely removed in the 1950's and the doorway relocated to create a larger dining area. We had to salvage pine from underneath our new cabinetry to fill in this gap and while it isn't perfect, it definitely adds character to the home (or at least adds to the character it already has!).