Harris Bond Wood - Herringbone (c. 1967)

A good portion of floor in the house was this wood parquet.  There was water damage in numerous locations and after 4 years of caring for wood floors and predicting that wood flooring and a dusty climate wouldn't mix we were anxious to swap this out for tile.

So before the kids and I arrived in El Paso, Ben scraped up over 1000 sq ft of the stuff with a flat head shovel.

But wait...we kinda liked that herringbone pattern.  So in homage to the original design of the house, we had the pieces relaid in the office (formerly maids quarters) by our flooring crew.  We found about 30 sq ft of new old flooring in a box in the garage so that was easy since it was in sq ft sheets, but the other  70 sq ft consisted of hundreds of individual pieces that had to have the old glue whittled off before it was relaid piece by piece.

Clearly it needed to be refinished.

So we rented a sander from The Home Depot for a day and sanded and sanded and sanded (with increasing grit each time)

Then moved on to using a belt sander for edges and tough spots.

Then wood filled any missing chunks.  Note - I have yet to find a wood filler that I feel is actually stainable as adevertised.

We made the mistake of not enclosing the room that we were sanding and we ended up with sawdust all over the house.

Stain going on - Minwax Early American

Multi-Purpose Room Demo

I don't know how to post things in the order they happened without driving myself crazy, so I've got to start somewhere - ugliest room first.