Hardwood Floors Revisited

Last week we hit another milestone – the hardwood floors are patched, sanded, and stained!

The house originally had a furnace and central air conditioner in the crawlspace, so we patched the holes for the old floor registers. We had originally wanted to save the kitchen floors, but the water damage was so extensive that it made more sense to start fresh with new floor boards. We were, however, able to re-use some of the kitchen flooring to patch other areas in the house. Here’s the kitchen during demo and then with the new floor just before we installed the cabinets.

The hallway was another area that posed an interesting challenge. The old floor register was placed directly in the middle of the hallway and had to be patched. There was also a lot of water damage along the wall shared with the kitchen, so those areas needed repairing. We opted to remove all of the floor boards and then salvage what we could. The photo on the left shows the new subfloor. In the photo on the right you can see we used two different types of floor boards. The darker boards are original to the house and the lighter boards are salvaged from another Atlanta home. We mixed the two types of floor boards to help aesthetically smooth the transition into the kitchen and the rest of the house.

I knew the floors were in rough shape, but I had no idea just how bad it was. The photo on the left shows the floors after just one pass of the electric sander. The difference is incredible! The photo on the right is the kitchen floor with four options of stains. We chose the Golden Oak stain from Minwax, a lighter color to balance the dark kitchen cabinets. We’re using the same stain throughout the house. A consistent floor color will help to visually connect the rooms and make the home feel a little larger, and the satin finish will minimize visible scratches. The floor stain does not qualify as low-VOC under the EarthCraft House green building certification, but the Bona Mega floor finish does.

While floors are finished, they were covered for their protection before I could get a photo. Sorry for the cliffhanger, but I’ll make sure to get some photos next week once the trim and painting are done.