Part Two English Tudor Entryway

Here is Part Two of our entry floor remodel: Restoring a Wood Floor

My husband and I loved finding the red oak wood floor under all the layers of tile. It was a real happy relief. 

Old homes are full of unexpected finds along the way. It appears when the closet doors were removed by the prior owners they had to remove part of the oak wood floor. Instead of fixing it with new red oak wood they put down pine boards. Then they covered the pine boards with linoleum tile. The next homeowners did not like the linoleum and covered it over with porcelain tiles. Sometimes I wonder what the homeowners were really thinking! I would say
 r-e-a-l-l-y to them! In my New Jersey sarcastic accent! 
I wish I could have whispered in their ears and said something like...What are you nuts! Why would you do something so dumb? lol 

Of course we could not leave it looking like this. We have been fixing all the bizarre fix up's in our home and this is just another one. Friends always comment that "no one will ever know all the work you put into fixing your home." 
I tell them that's great it should not look patched! It does seem to take US forever to get things finished. It's just my husband and me restoring our home. Sometimes I wish we had more time to work on projects or had a crew. But having a crew of workers would cost us a fortune in This Old House :)

 Here you can see the pine boards. It was just not the look we were hoping for. 

My husband sanded the wood floor and before we stained it we had to patch the flooring. 

 My husband pulled up all the pine boards and a section of the 

red oak flooring that had a hole in it I guess from the original doors. 

 He then had to chisel the original tongue and groove floor so we could put down the new red oak planks.
*Make sure your chisel is sharp.

 Here is a close up of removing the tongue and grove.

The new red oak floorboard now fits perfectly against the original plank boards. 

It took some time getting the rest of the oak floorboards to fit. My husband tapped the new boards in place with a rubber mallet. 

Do you see the hole where the original doors must have been?

Here we were able to use part of the original red oak floorboard.

 When I flipped over the original floorboard and it had the name HARRIS on it. Cool Huh!!!

Harris is still in business after all these years. 

I just looked them up.

 Source

It felt good to salvaged one of the original floorboards. 

It was just like fitting a jigsaw puzzle together. 

 We needed to fit one last floorboard but the gap was two small and it was not even. 

I said to my husband we need to make spacers. Every day we would add bigger spacers and the gap finally got wide enough for the last piece of floorboard to go in. What a relief that was. 

 The wood floorboards fit like a glove! It turned out fantastic! 

Like it once looked 100 years ago.

Now the fun part trying to match 100 year old red oak floor stain to the rest of our wood floors.

Stay Tuned for Part Three.

xo,

Dee