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.