Warning: LOTS OF PICTURES Ok….here we go weeeeeeeeeeee….So I get a call from my wife ”you better come up here and look at these floors” I nicely told her just to get them clean enough for us to start sanding. She repeated ”get up here we have a problem” As you can see from the picture we had a problem. As she started to clean the floors she noticed that most of the flooring was separated, and not just a little bit :-( The house originally did not have a basement on it. The former owner had someone put it in and I guess the house rolled and most of the hardwood flooring came apart…..bummer….....

So my lovely wife asked what I was going to do about it. I told here the only right way I know of is to tear it all out and re lay it!! WOW about 1400 sq feet…So we tear it it, just her and I, as you can see we ended up with a mess…...

Then she asks me whats next and I tell her we need to go through each piece and pull nail and scrape wood putty off until it is good enough to put back down!....Well lets just say she wanted no part of that..So she calls me the next day and said she found some 3 1/4 inch red oak “rustic grade” floors for .97 cents and how much should she buy? told her we didn’t have it in the budget, well lets just say she told me we did :-).........Then she wants a picture of the pile of old flooring to put on craigslist to sell, I really didn’t think anyone would want it with all the nail in it yet but someone called within and hour of her placing the add and bought it! Ok back to our floors…...well since we had all the old flooring up I went as fixed all the broken subfloor, and using 1 5/8 screws screwed down every strip on every joist with 2 in each spot. Not as fast as I had hoped but I would never get the chance to do it right again…...

Well I know most, or normal, people don’t like rustic grade flooring….but we loved it…just loved all the different colors and the defects/knot holes where just great…..

well I get going on it and came up with putting ebony, black putty in all the know holes and defects, to many colors to try to match and we saw it as a beauty mark not a defect….weird I know….I put ebony pegs around the fireplace, and on the stair treads, filled all the holes and sanded.

Finish pictures in the next part…....