demo weekend - flooring

Part of the charm of old homes is that they usually have hardwood floors and ours is no exception. But unfortunately, ours aren't in super good shape. Either the dog that did so much good work on the basement carpet also found a spot or two upstairs or the previous owner was fond of plants, but not really fond of those little plastic things that keep the water in the plants from leaking down into the floor and doing some real damage.

So there were a number of spots that were just too far gone to repair:

You can see the black damage that won't sand out, no matter what we do. So the only thing for it was to rip out the boards and put in new ones. As you can guess this is an involved process cause floors don't really like to come out once they are in. The process involves drilling some holes, using a circular saw to cut lenghtwise along the board, and then some serious chiseling to get all the pieces out, carefully leaving surrounding board's tounge, groove, and surfaces untouched. 

This spot was the largest, but Matt also took out two more before we decided it would be good to stop and see how difficult it would be to put the new boards in before taking anymore out. There are still a few more spots I'd like to do, but we'll see how the repair goes over the next few days before we bite off more than we can chew. 

Here's what the first hole ended up looking like after Matt removed all the bad boards. Its a lot of work to fix one little water stain!

We also took care of another over by the wall in the living room that is coming down, and one in the corner of the little bedroom. 

I hate to say it, but I think there's one more big spot that has to come out (also in the little bedroom). This one's also a doozy, but Matt is getting speedier in his demo process.

 I bought some new wood to replace the old a few days ago and its been sitting out to acclimate to the climate and humidity in our new place. With any luck we should start fixing floors tomorrow!