Welcome Back, Wood Floors

I envisioned something close to this when I first stepped into the house, but actually seeing it come to fruition is quite another thing.

It was great to see that the linoleum I ripped up on Christmas Eve hid something worthwhile.

The bare wood floors made the room feel much airier, even though there wasn't much to define the space. They even tempted me to leave them bare, which I might've done if it were a more rustic space overall.

So pretty, I thought.

Still, I'm tempted to do something out of the ordinary, such as painting them white, as seen in this Door Sixteen post. Maybe I'll save that for the kitchen, which still has that awful blue-green linoleum tile.

Getting a New Floor

Thank goodness for knowing the right people.

After having panicked over the disastrous state of my second-floor bathroom, I called around to see who knew how to proceed. One of my phone calls went to Ireno, the local jack-of-all-trades who had helped strip the hardwood floors down to their original 1901 splendor. (More on that later.)

Ireno surveyed the damage and said the floor was fine as it was. Normally, I'm appreciative of the no pasa nada approach, but in this case my senses were screaming something entirely different.

It turns out my brother-in-law, Arturo, worked regularly on home renovations throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. After determining that new joists were needed, he and a friend proceeded to replace the 3-by-8 sections of lumber.

Cutting into the masonry, they went on to shore up the framing that was already there and properly box off the plumbing for the toilet drain. Underneath all the soggy tiles and poured concrete, it looked like a plumber had simply cut the joists to accommodate the commode.

That reminds me of a story my very capable — and highly recommended — building inspector, Matthew Barnett at Accurate Building Inspectors, told me:

You learn two things in plumbing school. On the first day, they teach you how to throw away the instructions. On the second day, they teach you how to cut wood.

I laughed, not knowing how true I would learn that to be. Matthew was also the one who asked me a poignant question following his inspection of the six-unit building at 289 Harman Street that I had originally planned to buy.

"Are you a general contractor?"

"No," I said.

"Well, you're gonna be."

Unexpected Trouble

One of the cardinal rules I learned soon after buying a 1901 limestone brick fixer-upper was: Expect the unexpected.

And how.

One Saturday morning, I awoke to find my bathroom flooded, its ceiling bowed and dripping water. Panic quickly took over and I ran upstairs to look for the source of the leak. No one was yet living there and we hadn't done any plumbing work yet other than installing a new pedestal sink, so I was bewildered.

The second-floor ceramic tile seemed a bit damp, but there was no geyser to deal with. That's when I decided to start chipping away at the tiles to discover wet subfloor concrete and joists — originally 3-by-8 — that had nearly rotted through to about an inch's thickness. What little wood remained there was spongy and unnaturally dark.

A call to my brother, Marco, led to us stripping it down to the bare joists.

Later, a visitor to the house to whom I had related this story remarked:

"Oh, you really have no bathroom floor. When you said that, I thought there was probably a hole in it at most."

These days, I'm not much for hyperbole.