Great Room Project: Ready For Company?

November 17, 2006

We pulled up the old carpeting and carpet pad.

When we pulled up the padding, the carpet staples stayed. Here’s Monte pulling one out.

In addition, the edges of the room had carpet tack strips. We spent all of the 18th pulling those out.

The morning and afternoon of the 19th was spent cleaning the floor by vaccum, water, and tack cloths. As I mentioned in an earlier post, previous owners had refinished the floors at one time. But not only did they neglect to refinish the closets, they didn’t refinish the entire Great Room.

We discovered the center of the floor had never been polished. (This was apparently a common practice at the turn of the century, because my folks and I discovered the same phenomenon in their 1903 house. In their house, only the edges of all the rooms were polished because a large area rug covered the center.)

When the previous owners had refinished our floor, they sanded and repolished only the edges again. How lazy is that?!

Thus, you can see in this photo the unsanded center, the refinished part previously covered by an area rug, with the very outer edge darkened by exposure to light.

That afternoon we hurriedly moved the furniture back in, minutes before the guests arrived!

The floors were unfinished, the wood trim not replaced, and we didn’t have electricity in the room, but we still had a great time.

It’d been a year since Monte and I had closed off the Great Room in anticipation of our Project, so it was actually kind of a strange feeling to be using it as living space again.

Our house suddenly seemed so much bigger!

Happy Thanksgiving 2006!

But the room still needed a few finishing touches…