Floors

When we moved, everything went in the garage, including us! We lived in the carriage house while the wood floors were being refinished. The study was covered in old checkerboard linoleum, fortunately. The linoleum had protected the floor for many years and it finished up beautifully.

The ravages of time had not been quite as kind to some other rooms. What initially appeared to be scorch marks near some of the fireplaces turned out to be cat spots. Apparently cat urine is some potent stuff. The guys we hired (Floors by Steve) did a great job of getting most of them out. However there were a few places where we had to find new quarter-sawn oak to make patches.

Still other rooms had been covered with other vinyl or linoleum tile. We had all of it tested for asbestos. Two rooms had asbestos tile (9 inch tiles), while the others didn't (including the study). We hired an asbestos abatement company to remove the nasty stuff, but removed the others ourselves.

Getting the tile or sheets up isn't that hard, but scraping the adhesive off is a royal pain. My father spent hours scraping the adhesive in the master bedroom, but we'll likely end up carpeting in there anyway! The bedrooms, as private rather than public spaces, have fir floors instead of oak. Two of the bedroom finished up nicely, but something rather heavy sat in the middle of one of the others for a long time - the adhesive is impossible to get off. In the master bedroom, someone tried to stop the floor from squeaking by face-nailing with about 300 eightpenny nails. Ugh.