Even though that third button on the left makes reference to a bookshelf, this is one of our real bookshelves. There is another one just like it on the other side of the room. The button just tracks what books we are reading and have read - But you probably knew that, right?

Anyway, just picture the floor in rich, dark wood, and the walls in a soft garden green.. This room just might end up looking pretty damn good… Earnest thinks so…

Many many moons ago and in less moldy times, we pulled up the carpeting in the living room with plans of refinishing the floor. Between floods, weeklong power outages, and multi-week colds, we never really got around to doing that.

Now, as part of the floods repairs, we are getting new bedroom carpeting, new bathroom flooring and new kitchen flooring. We recently went to the flooring company that our contractor is using to supply the materials to pick out colors and styles.

While there, we were hoping to buy a floor for the living room (re-finishing turned out not to be an option) with some money we had left over from our income tax refund.

It turns out labor adds a ton of costs. To the point that we were being shown the ugliest flooring imaginable to try to fit into our budget. I went home that night and dropped one thousand dollars sight unseen on flooring from simplefloors.com. Even with having to install it ourselves, I feel we still came out way ahead. The sample has arrived in the mail, and it’s quite nice. Plus, we saved a minimum of one thousand five hundred dollars…

Varnished Walnut Hand-Scraped Style Wood Floor

We went to a greasy spoon tonight to try to unwind from a grueling week of dealing with doggie injuries and contractors under our house starting flood cleanup.

When we got home, we decided to play the fun game called “What the hell is that hissing noise and the water gushing from the wall?”

This is the aftermath of that fun game. We are currently waiting a few more hours for the joint cement to set on an emergency capping I made of the hot water line after finding a leak in the elbow joint. That’s after ripping half the wall apart and smashing the sink into pieces to get at the leak….

[update: capped. success. it can now sit until the plumber that was originally coming out to look at our other issues can now properly repair this one too.]

Another reason why the floor project is languishing. For some reason the previous owners thought it a classy touch to lay down tiling over the lovely hardwood floor to go with the bargain basement shag carpet. This stuff is extremely difficult to pull up…

Please view the larger version to truly enjoy the photo.

Room fully de-rugged. A burst of unexpected energy in me also produced a final furniture arrangement I really like. This view is from the hallway leading to our two hobby rooms. The kitchen entrance is on the far right.

It’s not really that shocking of an admission that I was somewhat scared of starting this undertaking. Ripping up the last vestage of carpet, though, helped. I think I can pull it off. Or at least make it look good enough for our rustic/shabby chic tastes.

I’ve just about settled on Minwax products for the process. Going with a darker (undecided) Minwax^® Wood Finish™ stain and a Minwax^® Water Based Polyurethane for Floors finish. I have also decided to properly sand the floors and fill in gaps with the Minwax^® Sanding Sealer.

As an endeavor such as this takes planning (and other than googling, done none.) , I’ve decided to hold of doing anything this weekend and instead wait to the following weekend to start the grand undertaking..

Gumption delivered more floor detail this last weekend. We agreed that either we pull the carpeting up, or we don’t. There is no halfway here. (Okay, in fact, this picture is showing precisely halfway, but you know what I mean.)

I ended up yanking out a little more than half of the carpeting in the living room to reveal a once gorgeous 89 year old wood floor with a deep mahogany stain. At the same time, we had a contractor willing to match a crazy counter-offer I made to him for re-finishing our floors - 300 dollars less than his original quote.

It seems, however, the in-thing for flooring nowadays is the grotesque orange-yellow look of naked wood with clear varnish on top of it, ala Ikea. His quote proudly stated that he will perform tons of sanding to remove every single imperfection in the floor and lay down a swedish finish that will be hard as nails and feel like glass underfoot.

Only problem is that’s the exact opposite of what we want.

We love character, detail, history. That’s one of the main reasons we bought a house built in 1917 and not one of the McMansions up the street. We looked at new flooring. And kept going back to the “hand scraped” look. Deep bevels and heavy textures in the wood from the days of leveling a floor using hand tools. The feel underfoot of time, craftsmanship, nature. Not a bowling alley lane

So…. After many a go at google, I have decided to take a gamble and do it myself. After all, house redesign and remodeling isn’t about doing it just like the pro’s, it’s about trying new things to discover something you like. A prime example of this that comes to my mind is a decorating show where the owner decided he wanted a cement bathtub. He cast it himself and it turned out amazing and is now an interesting and functional one-of-a-kind piece.

So, this weekend I’m going to pull up the rest of the carpet. I’m going to rent a 40 buck a day floor buffer with an abrasive pad on it and scrape up the dirt and chalk on the floor. Then we are going to test putting a light stain over the existing floor - hoping it soaks into the light warn-to-the-wood areas, and slightly darkens the places with existing stain. Then, without sanding any uneven boards or raised grain, we are going to varnish with a waterborne system that’s extremely less toxic than the standard swedish finishes.

Do we care that it won’t be as hard as nails? That the raised grain may be detectable on our bare feet? Or that it may have an uneven, reclaimed barnwood look to it? Not at all.. In fact, that’s what we are hoping for..

Click here for a larger version of the picture.

Couldn’t get to sleep lastnight. Called in sick this morning. After breakfast at noon, and staring into the computadora for way too long, I finally got up and moved a piece of furniture aside and confirmed something we’ve been hoping for; Lovely wood floorboards. Hidden by a grotesque carpet and, oddly, painted white. Unsure if the white is just from a bulk painting of the walls and thins out in the center, or if they actually (strangely) painted the whole floor. Either way, we are happy. Now all we need is one weekend and between $2-$6 per sqft for a warm, rich wooden floor.