Floors - Post 2 - Poly

With the sanding and puttying complete I began to poly the floors. For the first coat I used gloss poly and satin for the next two coats. This gives the floor more depth but still has a satin finish.

The first thing to get poly was the original rear door threshold. this goes between the main hall and the rear hall. The rear hall was at one time a porch.

I then started in the dining room.

First coat down in the sunroom.

First coat in the dining room.

The rear hall has newer yellow pine flooring. I stained it to match the color of the cypress. Here is the the coat of stain after it was applied. You can see the threshold sitting in the foreground, it is not in place in the pic.

Second coat of poly in the dining room and office.

Looking into the rear hall with a coat of stain and a coat of poly. I think the color matches pretty well. The stain is Minwax Red Chestnut.

Sunroom second coat.

Third coat going down.

This pic shows the wear in the floors that I didn't want to lose by sanding. There's a lot of character yet the floor is perfectly smooth, you can slide on it in your socks and not worry about splinters.

I wanted to put more than three coats down but I had been working on the floors for so long that I decided three was enough.

Up next is refinishing the master bedroom floor and upstairs.

Floors - Post 1 - Sanding

We will eventually be rebuilding the chimneys in the office (Original kitchen) and Dining Room but for now I needed to put some wood down to cover up the hole. these are pics of the Dining Room fireplace. The mantle is from a house near Tyrone, GA that was destroyed by a tornado about 10 years ago.

Then I began what would become an extremely long process of sanding the floors. I started in the office. The first pic is a before shot.

After one pass with the drum sander.

Here is the main hall.

After one pass.

Here is the parlor, unfortunately I could not save the faux grain paint on the floor. I just couldn't match up the color. the paint gummed up the sandpaper pretty badly.

Here is the dining room after one pass.

The floors are heart cypress. Cypress is a softwood but after almost 160 years they have become petrified and are extremely hard. I had to do many passes on a complete 90 degrees to the grain just to get down in the dips.

I don't want to sand the floor perfectly level, I want to leave some of the wear in the floor, I just want to make sure it's smooth.

First pass in the Sunroom. The flooring in here is white oak, Oak is a hardwood but it was much easier to sand than the cypress.

Fourth pass on the dining room floor. It's starting to look good.

Looking from the office (original kitchen) into the dining room and the sunroom beyond.

View from the sunroon looking into the dining room and the office beyond.

Dining room floor.

Looking from the main hall into the dining room with the sunroom beyond.

Now that the sanding is done I need to fill in the nail holes in the parlor, main hall, dining room, and office. All of these rooms had flooring nailed on top of it. I contemplated using sawdust from the sanding mixed with poly but i didnt like the results so I am using Elmers Probond wood filler in cherry stain.

This is the parlor floor, this pic gives you a good idea of all the holes I need to fill.

Putting the putty down in the main hall.

Putting putty down in the dining room.

Parlor.

In the next post I will be putting down the poly.

Office and Dining Room Floors

I went back and forth for a while on whether I should pull up the floors in the Dining Room and Office. The early 1900's heart pine floors were very pretty and it would be a lot less work, but if I left them there would be a lip between the Dining Room and the hall. In the end I decided to pull them up and I'm glad I did for a number of reasons, the biggest being that there was not a lot of meat left on them and sanding them would most likely have caused them to split.

These are the floors in the Office, which we have begun calling the Christmas room because of the red and green alternating floor boards.

I sanded a small area and wet it to get an idea of what it would look like, The color is a bit off but it's enough to see how red it is, I'm wondering if they are Cedar.

An interesting discovery I made while working in the office is the original walls. Sometime in the Victorian era they built another wall next to the original to make pocket doors (which are gone of course). I pulled off the trim that covered the opening and found out that the original walls were wide plank wood, each board is at least 10" wide.