Seattle is full of old houses with fir flooring. When the trees were being logged in the area the material was abundant and cheap. Many of these floors are 100+ years old, and have boards close to 20 feet long. Over the years this floor had been waxed, painted, repainted several more times, and had carpet installed and taken out multiple times. I had the opportunity to restore this floor in a Capitol Hill apartment building built in 1903. You can see in the before pictures the layers of paint, staples, and decades old carpet pad (the yellow stuff) that was fused to the floor.
The first step was to crawl around pulling out the hundreds and hundreds of staples left in the floor from multiple carpet installations, and scrape off as much of the fused carpet pad as possible. Then it was a multiple day process of slowly grinding off the paint and wax with 16 grit sandpaper.
After that there were multiple places where the boards had split apart and needed to be glued back together, and large voids filled with putty. Because the floor was installed on top of sleepers (boards running perpendicular to the flooring) spaced 16″ apart, there was effectively 3/4″ of air space under most of the floor. Because the tongues and grooves had split over the years on many boards, there were places that needed to be shored up with screws to keep them from sinking into the space below when stepped on.
Once the floor had been stripped and repaired I was able to begin a more typical refinishing process, albeit much more carefully since the boards still wanted to flex up and down, and could splinter apart if caught in the wrong way.
Because fir is so soft, and bruises when compressed, the floor tells the story of the century of usage it has seen, from the areas of high traffic, to the places where rugs sat decades ago (the dark rectangles visible in some of the pictures), to the places where careless carpet installers dragged their knives across the old wood (the dark lines running across the floor in a few places). The floor becomes much lighter when sanded, but over time will darken back to a rich reddish brown which should also reduce the color contrast in some areas.
As a side note, the final pictures were taken just before buffing the floor for the final coat, so there is some fine dust visible where the edges have been sanded. The floor was sealed with Bona IntenseSeal and coated with two more layers of Bona Mega satin. Water-based finishes are especially nice in an apartment building like this to avoid subjecting other tenants to the noxious smells of oil based finishes.
In the end, this unit now shares the character and style of the rest of the building, and will provide a warm and charming backdrop for the next tenants for years to come.