Ball Ground Historic Renovation: Original Hardwood Floors

View of closet floor showing laminate installed over original hardwood

One of the first things I wanted to do when I moved in was remove the carpet. I suspected that there were hardwood floors beneath the coverings, but I couldn’t do any demo to find out before I purchased the property. The former owners did pry up a corner of the carpet in the living & dining rooms before closing and confirmed that there was hardwood there. The kitchen had vinyl, there was laminate in the hallway and middle bedroom (new master bath), and carpet in the back bedroom & new master. After I moved in and started exploring, I found that they had probably installed the laminate over hardwood. I could see the hardwood (in good shape) in both of the hall closets. When they started the demo in the new bath, we could see that yes, the hardwood was intact. Dustin was concerned about the shape it was in, as was I. It didn’t make sense to me that you would choose to install wood laminate over hardwood, but again, maybe it was for convenience. I talked him into taking up the laminate in the new bath, promising we could be put in vinyl or tile if it was not salvageable. If it was good though, we agreed to move forward and take out the laminate in the hallway too. When Joe, the flooring contractor came, we did some more demo in the carpeted rooms and tried to get through the many layers of material, but really couldn’t get a definitive answer. Since the carpet wasn’t staying anyway, we agreed to get it all up and see what we could find underneath.

The rest of the furnace in the basement.
It was disconnected when newer units installed

Joe discovering the floor furnace

Back in the dining room, we got a surprise. Right before the entrance to the kitchen in the floor, there was a newer (about 2’x3’) patched-in piece. Not sure what we’d find underneath, we pried it up and found the old furnace! I had seen this apparatus from the basement, but honestly had not given any thought to how the heat was piped into the house. Turns out it was a gravity floor furnace, manufactured by the Empire Stove Company in 1946. It used natural gas and we could see the burners on the bottom of the unit. Since it wasn’t in use, I took lots of photos to document it and we started thinking about how we were going to patch the floor. My floors are the same material as the walls – 1” thick, tongue and groove heart pine, not to be found at Home Depot. Fortunately, Dustin had an uncle who collected such things, and he was able to get enough to fill in this spot, and the place in the new bathroom where the closet wall had been.

label showing the company and serial number for the furnace

Of course during all of this demo, I have been living in the house. At first it was like camping, and I didn’t mind using a flashlight when I was in the living room or upstairs. Then, as they were working on the electric system, I would never know what outlets or lights would be working when I got home. I charged my laptop and digital camera in the kitchen, because those were the only outlets with 3 prongs. Ditto on the vacuum cleaner, with a very long extension cord. Not that I cleaned too often, there were just too many people coming and going to keep up with it. There were times when I dried my hair in the laundry room, got dressed in the dark, or arrived home to find the water to the toilet shut off because the plumber didn’t want a shower if someone flushed while he was working in the basement. The worst was when I came home one night after going out for drinks with my friend, Meghan. They had worked on the floors that day, and left the grate off of the a/c return vent. I’m not fond of this vent. It’s a regular size return, about 2’x3’, but it’s just outside my bedroom door, so you have to step on it, or jump over it to enter the room. It’s also loud, and dirty with years of dust. So I came home, maneuvered my way through the dark house until I got to the hallway, where the light has always worked. This night it didn’t. I’m standing in the dark house and then noticed that the return grate was missing. In my margarita haze, all I could think of was that I was going to step out of my bedroom in the middle of the night to use the restroom, and fall into the yawning, nasty hole in the hallway. I had to apologize to both Jody and Dustin the next morning for my panicked phone calls the night before, demanding the location of the grate and that the hallway light be reconnected. It was not my finest moment, but I blamed it on the tequila and tried to keep my after-hours phone calls to a minimum. Didn’t quite feel that way about texting, so Dustin continued to be bombarded as thoughts came to mind during very inconvenient hours.

But, back to the floors…I got lucky. Not only were the same hardwood floors in both bedrooms, but

Back bedroom, scraping off old
carpet & glue

also in the hallway too. They had to go through some pretty old material to get to them, but they turned out beautifully. As Joe said, “these floors are freakishly beautiful.” He also noted that he’s never seen old floors turn out this well; the joints were tight and there was very little damage. The only piece that needed replacing was right in front of the fireplace – it had some termite damage. Although Joe indicated that there was probably hardwood in the kitchen & laundry room too, Dustin and I held back about pulling up these floors, mainly because of the budget and knowing that there had been some water leaks so they might not be in as good of shape. We decided to stick to our plan of replacing the vinyl in those rooms.