Of course there are more advantages than just price and ease of installation to such an ingeniously crummy product; when the concrete subfloors are poured sloppily, as they generally are, it’s handy that your flooring bends like a tortilla.  Unfortunately, it only bends one way, so sometimes they had to abandon the pattern in the middle of the floor to make the parquet roll better.

But yet, having lived here before back in the 80′s, I had hope for these floors.  I knew that they had been carpeted for 40 years, the building until very recently hadn’t allowed pets, and that they had an old-fashioned wax finish that could be refreshed from almost any condition.  When I decided to move here ten years ago, a unit on the 13th floor with a balcony was available, facing Mt. Hood, and I took it sight unseen.  Friends from Seattle were here the weekend I moved in, and when they thought of the giant, light-filled Victorian apartment I had left they felt sorry for me.  White walls, lumpy white carpet, fluorescent lights, eight foot ceilings.  But I knew I at least had floors, and I did know a bit about paint, lighting, and whatnot.

Aside from the white vinyl flooring in the entry hall, which I had to very gingerly strip, the floors were bad but salvageable.   Though splattered with a lot of paint and damaged here and there by carpet stripping, a week or so of cleaning and chipping in my spare time, and a few extra tiles from the maintenance people to replace the unfixable, and I had them ready to wax.

Back in the old days, all oak floors were stained, the great majority of them the kind of caramel/amber you see here.  It was just enough color to soften the heavy grain and color variation without making the floors too dark; oak was chosen for its hardness rather than its beauty, and was thought to need a little stage makeup, so this was the choice.  The color was once so ubiquitous that Trewax has made a paste wax called “Indian Sand,” that mimics it perfectly, and I’ve been using it for twenty years.  With a little steel wool in the most damaged areas, and perhaps a second application, it can recolor, moisten, and make even the shabbiest floor convey at least a sort of genteel poverty, a look to which I always aspire.

Of course, the pesky part of all this is that although the floor might last without refinishing, forever, part of the deal is that once a year, somebody has to crawl around and rub each square with noxious-smelling, greasy paste, and then buff for hours.  Last year I hired it out.  This year, like the 99%, I did it myself.  Long live #OWS.

Barenaked floors

The project I’m working on now is something of an oddity, as they go.  It’s a 1923 English Tudor, located in the hills above Northwest Portland, next door to some longtime clients (See “Urban Oasis) who recommended me so highly that the owners just told me to outline what needed to be done, present a budget, and do it, showing a marked and remarkable indifference to what, exactly, I actually did.  So I just went ahead, and now it’s almost done.  Granted, the budget was not unlimited, and the goal was to make the house problem-free and rentable for a few years, until the market improves and it could be sold, so I couldn’t go hog wild like I might with an eager client wanting to create a spectacular showpiece.

No turning back now...

Still, it was odd to be picking paint colors, tile, and floors without any input, but naturally I warmed to the idea.  The house itself is something of a gem.  It’s just steps away from Chapman School, which in addition to being one of our best public elementary schools, is also the home of a seasonal flock of Vaux’s Swifts, gregarious migratory birds that flock in the schools chimney each fall, sending a cloud of birds into the sky each morning and evening for about two weeks, drawing crowds to the adjacent park from all over the city.  Architecturally, it was an early example of a style of architecture that swept the region in the 1920′s; the picturesque high-peaked, stucco and timber Tudor, with steep roofs, gumwood woodwork, multipaned windows, decorative archways, coved plaster ceilings, and ironwork flourishes.  I grew up in a similar house, and my brother lives in one today.

Floors stained; no clear coats yet...

Just to test out my design autonomy, I painted the living and dining rooms first, in a deep butterscotch with a hint of green to complement the stunning gumwood, and after a day or two of astonished contemplation, the owners declared the color a rousing success, and I was off to the races.  I chose a lighter version of the same color for the rest of the house, and turned my attention to the floors.  My flooring company, CZ Becker Wood Floors, is what I consider to be the best company in town, and where they really excel is in staining floors;  most companies want to just slap on a clear coat and go, they will spend a whole day mixing colors and applying them on site, and their careful edgework and “popping the grain” with water before staining guarantees a perfect color treatment.  Contrary to popular belief, hardwood floors were never meant to be “natural.”  Oak in particular was considered to be a workaday wood that only looked good in disguise, chosen for hardness, not beauty.  The floors in this house had been clear-coated, revealing unsightly spots that I didn’t want to spend money patching, and the color had yellowed to the point where it looked to be the same color as the woodwork, and I wanted to avoid both problems.  The only way to go was dark.

Of course, slapping up a coat of paint for client perusal is a far cry from choosing a color for floors that will need to last many years, but today I went ahead and chose a deep brown for the floors.  I anxiously await to find whether I’ve gotten myself in trouble.