This part of saving our house was tough on me. I spent many countless hours looking at the original old growth pine floors that graced the first floor of the house and looked at ways to save them. They were badly damaged from years of carpet over the top along with some major pet damage in some of the rooms. I was also missing many pieces of the floors, and had numerous large holes drilled through them. Lastly to add insult to injury, whoever was hired to put in the carpet came in with a framing hammer and 16 penny nails, they drove a nail through the wood into every joist and into every plank. So by the end of this we had nails 16 inches on center every 3 inches. Thousands of nails and damaged wood with a waffle imprint from the framing hammer. After different opinions I decided we would pull the floors, and shim the huge waves in parts of the floors, lay plywood subfloors and then lay new wood floors. We spent some extra money in this area to go with select quartersawn white oak floors to stick with the style and time period of the house.
I did manage to take my time pulling up the old floor and saved a large portion of the old 14ft pine boards. The ones in good condition will be used around the house for woodworking projects. I also plan to use the old wood to rebuild the front porch floors at some point down the road.
That was a brief look at the floors in the kitchen, the next pictures are of the front room of the house, we have to do this in the entire first floor. We have all the floors ripped up and have about 3/4 of the plywood floors layed back down.
Two Alarm Victorian 