We’ve been at this project for quite a long time now and wearing things out is inevitable. My shoes for instance.
I bought these for a fabulous trip to visit friends in the UK where these shoes have strolled through many sheep pastures, ancient castles and picturesque graveyards. Now, they have fallen victim to too much kneeling on wooden floors.
The wooden floors; however, are in great shape. The Doug Fir planking is going down fairly easily despite none of the rooms being truly square. The last plank in each room always requires a tapering cut which I do freehand on the table saw. This seems tricky at first but it’s no worse than using a Skillsaw and my cuts are quite straight.
My real concern is how well the old plank floors under the new ones will hold up. They took a considerable amount of water damage last fall when the roof was off and they developed quite a bit of cupping that had to be flattened out. A ton of galvanized ring shank nails took out most of the cupping and a bit of heavy sanding knocked down the really bad stuff. It seems to have worked so far in that none of the new planking squeaks but it might in the future. Of course, since our look is “ghost town revival” a few squeaks won’t be a bad thing.
Besides the boots, the only other casualty of floor laying was my rubber mallet.
When I first got it, I noted how cool the wood grain was but that; in fact, turned out to be its own downfall. Instead of the grain being straight and strong through the mallet head, it curved at a 45 degree angle making it very weak and after 800 square feet of flooring, it neatly snapped while whacking a particularly unrepentant plank.
On a more successful note, our color pallet has been working out nicely. Katie chose a green hue for the master bedroom and it serendipitously turned out to be a color that was used downstairs in the original saloon.
You can see the similarity in the photo above. The green floorboards were salvaged from a saloon wall to repair the bedroom floor. The wall color is just a darker version of the original.
The front door also received its new color.
The ocher color is the same that we are using on the windows and the trim color to come, is a deep brown which you may recognize from earlier posts. The front facade is hardly complete but the new brick threshold is in and all of the glass is now 1/4″ tempered to make it safe for the public. As for the porch lamp, it’s just a placeholder until we can find an antique that more suits the look.