The Story Behind The Doors

Have you noticed that I have a slight obsession with old doors?

My life, in regards to construction purposes, would be so much simpler if I didn’t.

Standard 36 inch doors are not hard to come by. They meet permitting parameters, they come with a pre-fabricated frame, easily installed. Minimal effort. You know what they don’t have? You guessed it….character. Danny cringes every time I say, “and then I could probably find a warehouse door for this spot.”

Deep down he’s got an appreciation for rehabilitating the “old” as well.

After a warehouse #adventure, I fell in love with the biggest, roughest, dirtiest, most unwanted doors in the place. This was a solo trip and so I had to ask the only employee working that day for some assistance, a lovely gal (her name escapes me, unfortunately).

So I drove carefully into the “yard” for loading.

Ladies and gentlemen, navigating the drive through the yard in a forward position was daunting enough. The realization then hits me…I’m going to have to reverse out of here. Under pressure to prove that I *can* in fact navigate the yard in reverse, with five doors hanging out the back-end, I succeeded in exiting the area with the slowest mph in this warehouse’s history, I’m sure of it.

A record is a record. I’m fine with it.

After transporting these doors to their new home, the rehabilitation began. Usually at night, long after clients have headed home and the salon doors are locked, I’d work on stripping dozens of layers of paint. Once the first layer of paint has been stripped and I’m sweating, I start cursing whomever (asshole) desecrated these doors in the first place.

Once I get in the rhythm though, my mind can’t help but imagine stories of who this person (still an asshole) was. Like, WHY? Just whyyyyy?

I think that’s what it is.

The rehabbed doors that join the old and new space.

I think it’s why I have an obsession with these old doors. While I work so hard to bring these back to life, I have movies playing in my head. I see the time periods (each layer of paint is a testament to those). I see all the hands that have turned those door knobs.

Grooms carrying their brides across the thresholds. New parents bringing baby home from the hospital. A nervous knock on this very door when a young man announces his arrival to pick up his date. Inviting family in for the holidays as the door swings open, with a cheerful, “hello!”

They don’t belong in a warehouse. They are worth rehabilitating.

The Story In The Floors

Hello All.  This is Danny.  Jenna’s husband.  I am the guy you may have heard making some noise over in the new space.  Jenna asked me to explain the saga of the floor so here goes.

All good and challenging things have started with a walk through the new space.  Jenna and I were busy contemplating the prospect of this next chapter: expanding The Hair Tailor.  Jenna had so many ideas and the potential was clearly there but through it all, I couldn’t help but notice the layers of rehab that had taken place in the space itself.  I caught myself poking around, doing some light investigating, and discovering various period-specific building materials and architectural anomalies. Yikes.

The space had some previous lives for sure and there was NO telling what was under the surface. Not ideal when you’re about to sink a good amount of money into what felt like a big question mark.

Carefully salvaging the original floorboards in the Isaac Staples Sawmill building.

Under that old Linoleum, there were really cool original planks…that seemed to be fashioned into a turn-of-the-century skate park.  No kidding there. The floor was not just wavey.  It was quite literally a wooden bowl. Neither intentional nor ideal for the space. The entire thing had settled between the timbers so badly that someone, over many decades, addressed it by basically building a bridge and covering it with the “new” floor. Problem not-so-solved.

The floor also had chutes cut through.  Some of these holes were big enough that you could drop a major appliance clear through without issue.  It was going to take some serious work and TLC.

We were going to have to pull up the old planks, level the area, and put them back down while patching the holes along the way all while damaging the old wood as little as possible.  Sounds easy but that last part was probably the most difficult.  The wood was brittle and the nails were those old square things that somebody pounded more than a century ago.  I can tell you this.  If you can fill a five-gallon pail with the nails you’ve pulled, you get pretty good at it.  If you fill a second pail, you’re a master…and your knees will never work quite right again. 

I hated that task but there is something about working in an old building that I love.  Not only seeing what they did but also knowing HOW they must have done it.  Hand tools and elbow grease went a long way both then and now.  It’s unbelievable, to say the least. 

You also find little artifacts in these old buildings.  Ordinary bottle caps and cigarette butts lay witness to a little downtime amidst some real hard work. A lost skeleton key wedged between the floorboards tells a story of someone’s bad day.  And there’s something about being the first person to see or touch these things in over 100 years sort of connects you in a very real way our predecessors and to a place in time that we can only imagine in black and white. 

I wonder who will find our lost trinkets.  I wonder what they will think when they take apart what we’ve left behind.

One thing that was obvious was that the flooring had a bit of a wave (this was not a good sign, clearly) I also noticed a spot or two that felt a bit spongy underfoot.  It’s an old timber-frame building with a lot of history so this brand of “rustic charm” is to be expected.  Either way, we knew we needed to do something with the floor.

If you know Jenna, or the current Hair Tailor space, linoleum (which is what the space started with) didn’t really fit into any of Jenna’s visions.  But finding original floorboards under all of it would.

We had to ask ourselves, do we address the spongy spots and just put something new over the entire thing or dig in and see what’s going on under there? That’s right. We had to see what was under it. You will never guess what we found. 

The flooring really started out as a footnote in the grand scheme of things.  Noteworthy but we’d figure it out. Right? Figure it out we did.

Little Francis, Jenna and Danny’s oldest son, helping pull nails and lay rope in the floor.

An old, gold key found under the floorboards.