Old house parts: a tale of love and hate

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again; I have a love/hate relationship with old house parts.

You see, it’s a catch-22. Aside from being really cool, I need old house parts to finish Isthmus House because there’s so little original left (thanks a lot 1930s-80s). The problem? To get them, they have to be taken out of some other house that, all things being equal, I’d rather they not leave at all. This is not something I take particularly lightly.

I explained this inner tangle to The Roommate one Saturday as I prepared to go look at a house my mother found on Craigslist that had baseboards I need for most of the downstairs.

After getting to the house, I found a couple of very important details:

1. The house, build somewhere between 1890 and 1912 (the guy gutting it kept changing the story) was being controlled burned and had recently been looted. There was almost nothing left of it.
2. Almost nothing left = something. I went for baseboards and left $20 poorer and 20 feet of baseboards richer (minus one large chunk taken out for a heat vent).
3. There was something else really important in that house - flooring. 

Being converted into a two-unit building has not been nice to Isthmus House. Where a wall was moved to make a bedroom downstairs from what was likely a den, small blocks of not-Douglas Fir were put in.

By the added archway, the wood now looks vaguely pinkish with bad stain and polyurethane on it. There are a few other, similar patches elsewhere in Isthmus House too that aren’t as egregious but are still pretty ugly.

 

All of this means that I need to feather in old, salvaged 3 1/4 inch wide Douglas Fir tongue and groove planks. Did I mention that those planks are up to 16 feet long in places? Good luck finding those nowadays and, even if we somehow could find it new, it doesn’t look the same next to old wood.

Aside from looking in every salvage shop I stumbled upon and online, I visited with my friendly hardwood floor repair experts and they couldn’t find extra flooring for patches either. I was looking at maybe 20 square feet of flooring salvaged from Isthmus House itself to cover a much greater total area and hoping I’d get lucky enough to not have to patch when moving the walls back where they belonged.

But, as they say, hope is not a plan and I clearly didn’t have one other than scouring the seven seas or stealing from somewhere else in Isthmus House if worse came to worst.

For once, I didn’t need a plan because the floors we needed so much were about to be burned to a crisp inside this little farmhouse in the boonies.

After speaking with the aforementioned guy-gutting-the-house, I was the tentative owner-to-be of some pretty awesome floorboards. Why tentative? They still had to come up intact and old floorboards don’t always like that plan.

This past Saturday, a full day before they were due, the guy called and said he had them ready and would even deliver (have you ever tried to fit 16-foot boards in your truck? I don't recommend it.). A few hours later, we unloaded over 200 square feet of the prettiest, dirtiest floorboards I’d ever seen straight into the basement. The total cost for floors that could have set me back a pretty penny? $180 – and another $20 bought me three period light fixtures that were probably on their way to the dump solely because they need to be rewired.

The boards do still have several nails so, Madison friends, let me know if you're looking for some cheap therapy hammering out nails!

Under normal circumstances (house not being destroyed), I’d never have been able to take these floorboards. In this case, though, it feels a little more like saving a great, old piece of a great, old house to live another day.