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Moving Forward at Melrose

Category: gardens and old home renovation | Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2008 4:20 pm

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It's a funny aspect of my blog history that I have a perfectly nice garden at my home- one which I have spent more than 10 years developing. And I never blog about it. Yet I blog, blog, blog about this place in Eastern North Carolina where there is no garden. True to my nature, I will continue that tacky history this time as well.

The ol' home place called Melrose is no longer on the market. It was taken off the market after I experienced overwhelming paranormal insight that came whispering in the wee hours of the night, saying that Melrose should stay in the family. That, plus the fact that housing market prospects are worse that a field of cotton waiting for boll weevils.

In the weeks since taking down the house-for-sale sign, I have reviewed the current status of the house and the grounds. I have come to the conclusion that all in all, things aren't all that bad. In the house, I had previously had the wallpaper taken down, only to learn that beneath the multiple layers of paper was, in almost all instances, drywall. In the process of stripping the paper, the drywall was awfully nicked and gauged. I was advised by the fellow who does much of the work on the house that one way to rehabilitate those walls would be to put on a skim coat of plaster, which would provide a smooth surface that could then be painted. Readers of previous blogs about Melrose will appreciate the absence of any consideration of using wallpaper.

I consulted several resources concerning the usefulness of going the skim-plaster route, and learned that the general idea was good, but the material to use is not plaster, but joint compound. Who'd a thunk? I found a fellow who lives not far from Melrose who will cover the walls at a very reasonable price, and that work is about to begin. Thank the Lord! He (the drywall man, and not the Lord) will do the three downstairs rooms that need the skim treatment, leaving a surface ready for painting by me or various sundry members of my family. Suddenly, the prospect of having a livable space by late winter or very early spring is not an insane thought.

Except.....

There is the small matter of the floors in all the downstairs rooms (not to mention the upstairs rooms). The floors, with one exception in Melrose's newest addition, are all original wide-plank wood that has not been cared for since the presidency of John Quincy Adams. Or perhaps it was Millard Fillmore. One or the other. But it has been a long time. As best I can tell, the floors have aged to a dusty gray, over which has been layered over many decades some kind of reddish-tint. Assuming that there was not mass murder in the house, I am left to ascribe the reddishness to a long-ago red paint job. On top of the vestiges of that intentional red paint are various examples of spilled paint, dollops of hardened joint compound, drips of compounds not yet analyzed , ground in dirt, and the occasional droppings of bird poop. Whatever else you can say about the floors, they have character.



There were very few givens when I started my research on what to do with those floors. I could leave them as they are, but that was a non-starter. I was advised by someone who knows what he is talking about (I do occasionally hear from such people) that under no circumstances should I allow the floors to be sanded with a drum sander. Historic floors deserve better. Therefore, it is a given that no drum sander will ever darken Melrose's doors or floors. Because I work with that idea as a given, I first had to decide what I hoped to achieve with the floors. My conclusion was that I want the floors cleaned of all the junk and stuff that either Jefferson or Fillmore left behind after one heck of a party at Melrose. If the floors retain that dusty gray with reddish tint, that's fine. I have no certainty what the reddish tint is, but it is not unreasonable to speculate that it's a paint put down long ago when it was fashionable to paint floors. If that is the case, I certainly do not want to erase all hints of the tints.

So, how to do that? You might be surprised to learn that there is no clear cut answer. Cleaning old, old, old floors without doing damage appears to be more art than science. My best resource, the one who said never to let old floors be sanded, suggested using a floor cleaner or paint stripper, applied carefully while on one's hands and knees. In addition to taken incredible amounts of time to do just one room, this suggested approach is useful for promoting existing arthritis, lumbago, and spinal curvature.

For the longest time I could not find a tool intend to do what I needed. All the tools I initially found were laden with testosterone, and meant to bring wood floors to their knees. Trees have knees, but do floors? I rather doubt it. Anyway, when all seemed hopeless -- rather like Indiana Jones when he's caught in the ancient Egyptian temple with deadly snakes and nary a way to escape (the reader can readily see I lean to the melodramatic) - I came across an internet mention of a product just introduced by Dave Orick, he of vacuum cleaner fame.

Orick has a sander, buffer, rug cleaner and lots-else machine. It works on every conceivable floor surface and makes wonderful strawberry daiquiris to boot. The sanding action is really for light sanding to remove surface gunk. It has a typical floor buffing action rather than the drum sanding action so often used to humiliate and mutilate floors. To a certain degree, this somewhat expensive machine is a pig-in-a-poke because I have not used it yet. I hope to do so very soon, and if it works as I dream, it will be worth its weight in undamaged wood flooring.


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