Our New Old House

Since we moved our bedroom furniture into the front bedroom I’ve started stripping the wallpaper off the walls. This wallpaper is one of my blog’s greatest hits. People comment on it all the time. I’m a little sad to see it go.

But there it goes!

This week I’ve been taking off the wallpaper in the back bedroom. Yeah, this wallpaper:

And behind the door I uncovered some pencil marks. It took me a minute to figure out what they were. See if you can tell:

Give up? It’s a child’s height and weight and the dates! The dates being from 1944 and 1945 and the height and weight matching the size of a five or six year old, I figured it must be my friend Judy, who lived in our house until the summer of 1945. She was six when they moved up the street to a bigger house.

Just below the measurements was another set of pencil marks:

Judy must have been practicing her numbers. (Sorry that picture came out blurry.)

I finished working on that room with a big smile on my face. Pictures of the back bedroom to come soon.

Now that I knew that the color was right, I was ready to start staining the freshly sanded floor. I used some pre-stain conditioner first.

It evened out the finish on the wood in preparation for receiving the stain.

I started doing sections, a few boards at a time so I could make sure the timing was even.

The color came out beautifully!

I was ready to give it a protective coating. I used Minwax Polyurethane for Floors in semi-gloss. Here it is with the first coat drying:

And here are some photos of it all done!

Overall, it was a good experience! This room was my test room to see if I could do the rest of the floors in the house myself. I feel pretty confident that I can do the rest, so check back again sometime in the future when I tackle the big project of the living room and dining room floors!

Last time I showed you how I sanded the front bedroom floor. A splendid time was had by all.

But while I was having all that fun with the great big power tool, I had a niggling question in the back of my head: How much of this gorgeous oak is there left and how deep can I sand?

I knew the floor had been refinished years ago and whoever had done it had taken off WAY too much wood. When I took the quarter round trim off the baseboard it exposed the original height of the floor and it had been sanded a good 3 millimeters down. I didn’t know how much wood was there to start with so I sanded with caution. I would have liked to go deeper and take out some of the deeper flaws, but I was so afraid I’d go right through the bottom of the oak that I erred on the side of having floors with an “antiqued” look.

After I had returned the sander to the Tool Lending Library, I was scrounging around in my basement for a rag or something and came across a chunk of wood that had been cut out of the floor of our front bedroom closet. We’d had a furnace vent installed and the installer had cut a round piece out of the floor and just left it in the basement. This meant I had a perfect cross-section of my floor!

As you can see, there was plenty of wood to work with, so when I do future rooms, I’ll be sure to sand more aggressively and really get that brand new finish. As it was, I didn’t kick myself too hard over the floor I’d just done. After all, a big bed would end up covering up most of the flaws anyway.

Now that I had a piece of the original floor, I could practice things! So I clamped the chunk of wood to my work bench and went all mad scientist on it.

This was really exciting for me because I was thinking about changing the color of the stain to refinish the floors. See, the last time they were redone was around 1964. At that time they painted all the woodwork white and restained the floor a honey gold color. It was certainly a nice color, but when I stripped the paint off the woodwork to reveal the red oak stain underneath, it clashed with the yellowish color of the floor. I wanted to pick another color that would compliment the red oak trim better, so I picked up a can of Minwax in Cherry.

I sanded half of the boards in my sample so I could compare the colors and also so I’d have a second chance if I tried this and changed my mind.

I got a small can of Minwax Cherry stain and tried it out on the sanded wood. The instructions said to leave it on 10-15 minutes. I experimented with different times to get the right depth of stain.

The first round of stain was too light at 10 minutes.

But after the second round, giving it a couple more minutes, it came out just the way I wanted.

Now that I had the stain I wanted, I took my sample upstairs to compare it with the woodwork.

Keep in mind that I haven’t varnished the woodwork yet, so the color on that will come out a little deeper red when that’s done. But I was very happy with the cherry color, so I decided to proceed! Check back again soon to see the whole floor stained!