Redwood Floors – From Subfloor to Finished Art

Redwood Floors – From Sub floor to Finished Art

One of the biggest challenges in reviving the Eureka house was the floor and all that covered them. After a year of removing carpets, vinyl flooring, plywood and particleboard we were left with redwood subfloors. The rough planked floors were mostly square cut with the occasional gap that exceeded a ¼ inch.

Houses in Eureka have the unfinished subfloors covered with carpet or some other easy surface. The houses often do not have the hardwood floors, a few have Douglas fir, but many were left with subfloors. The cost of importing hardwoods was just prohibitive. Many of houses you do see with traditional oak floors were added later in the 20s or 30s.

After looking at oak and maple hardwoods we came back to the redwood subfloors. We loved the wide planks of old growth, some up toe 18 in. wide and many of them over 20 ft. long. You can just imagine what it was like to build these houses at the turn of the century.

There was concern about the softness of redwood, but we looked at other redwood floors and they were holding up well.

Our friend, Rick Willits from Blue Lake, gave us a great deal of encouragement and some advise on cleaning up the floors. If you need floor work and love wood then Rick is the guy to see on the North Coast.

We spent weeks cleaning the floors, scarping off the cardboard glued to the floors, cleaning the gaps, pulling a million tacks and nails and re-setting the large nails holding floor board down. Once our work was done Rick came in with the floor sanders and 4 coats of low gloss Varathane to finish the job.

The wide plants show off the old growth redwood that makes this house really shine. It helps tie the house the north coast and the ancient forest that are so much of the North Coast.

We plan to cover most of the floors with a collection of bright period rugs to protect our new floors.

New Walls - Drywall Up and Painted - One Year Later

It's been a busy year in Eureka, but I've been slow to post updates. Today I am talking about new drywall over old messy walls and working to make the most from original molding throughout the house. The Eureka house, made from tons and tons of old growth redwood, has interior walls with wide planks attached over 2X4 studs. There were many layers of wall paper, some that fell off the walls and some that was permanently glued to rough redwood planks. We scrapped dumpsters full of old smelly wall paper from the house. Once we had as much paper off as possible we decided to re-cover the walls with drywall. Without removing molding the drywall masters used mostly ¼ inch drywall on the walls – and went either 3/8" or ½" on ceilings.

Leaving the molding in place protected the lovely old molding – but I'm sure it make fitting the drywall more difficult. The bottom molding was trimmed back a ¼" to make a smooth connection between the walls and the base molding.

This was a huge job, but a crew was in and out in a couple of days. The taping and sanding took several weeks, but finished up beautifully. Once the taping and sanding was done we put a finish on all the walls with Tuff-Hide primer-surface applied with rollers. We put on 50 or 60 gallons of the tough hide on, which provided both a final smooth coast as well as the primer base.

We had help with the tough-hide from friends who were paid off with hearty meals. You've seen Dave before in this project. We finished the tough-hide over the July 4th weekend.

With walls covered – all that was left was picking paints and getting it done --- Most of the painting got finished up over a long Christmas Holiday.