Dawn Brocco's Life & Design Blog

Can't print yet - ugh, so I'll get patterns written, at least. I feel like a race horse, at the gate, ready to charge ahead, but the darn gate won't open. Being frustrated is useless, but with each passing day that I can't print, the remaining days of August keep getting increasingly tense with the work that *must* be done.

Too humid for the attics today, and I need to get the library floor scuffed and start its painting. But with all this rain and humidity, nothing will dry.

When we originally began work on that room, it had been a kitchen, one of several in this house, as it was divied up into apartments - how I hate when that happens to old houses. As we ripped up the tile floor and another layer beneath that, I thought about that room, being off the parlor, it might have been the original farmer's "office". It's not a big room, as all the rear rooms in the house are only about 9' or 9.5' square, with some being a bit longer, only because 2 small rooms had been opened into 1.

And it had no fireplace - there are only 2 hearths in the house, but by 1850, woodstoves were well in use, so the fireplaces weren't used as such - especially with no dampers! They used woodstoves, as I found, and hubby patched, the holes into the chimneys, as I stripped off the 8 layers of paper in each room.

Anyway, I imagined that the office floor should be brick/barn red - like the brick red I choose for the front door and the hall armoire we restored. Even though all the other floors, wide board downstairs, narrow board upstairs were unpainted, just shellaced, as old pine floors tend to be.

And guess what color the wood floor was under all those kitchen floor layers? - the same brick red I had chosen. Old houses speak to you, you just need to listen and imagine. So, I oil painted it years ago, but in the flexing of the floor, it cracked off in spots. The original red was paint of some sort, not stain, and I don't know if they had the same problem, but hubby says over coats of urethane will keep the oil painted floor in good shape. So, sanding and repainting await me, but not today - yet more rain!