![\"House](\"https:\/\/sduptownnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/DSC00461.jpg\" "\\"DSC00461\\"")
<\/a>For some, a gleaming hardwood floor is the vintage home\u2019s crowning glory. For others, it\u2019s just that thing you walk on. Most old-house owners, however, fall somewhere in between \u2013 wood floors are beautiful, they\u2019re functional, but they\u2019re nothing to get too worked up about \u2013 until it\u2019s time to refinish them. Then wood floors become THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD. <\/p>\nDondi Dahlin of Mission Hills wrote recently for advice about her wood floors. They were causing her some stress: \u201cI live in an historic home. Since I bought it four years ago, I have had a very difficult time due to the very soft Douglas fir wood floors. Just one hour ago I put another large scratch in the floor. It is breaking my heart. Can you please advise? Everything dents the floors.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dondi closed her e-mail with a poem on the blessings of being a new mother. Although I don\u2019t usually do floors, I felt a certain tugging of the heartstrings: New mother. Historic house. Her wood is breaking her heart!<\/p>\n
Dondi lives in the Ida R. Hedges house, a 1904 \u201cfolk style\u201d dwelling in what was originally called Crestline. This little-known pocket of early 20th-century houses is perched on a bluff overlooking Curlew Canyon. In person, Dondi doesn\u2019t look like a new mother \u00ac\u2013 she\u2019s trim and has the sort of poise and posture you usually find in a dancer, which is what she is (Middle Eastern and Polynesian). Her house has gone through some unfortunate changes inside \u2013 a previous owner removed the bookcases because they were \u201ctermite-eaten\u201d \u2013 but the living room is large, light-filled and possessed of a beautiful old Douglas fir floor with a large, hard-to-miss scratch in the middle.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were moving some boxes,\u201d Dondi explained. \u201cAnd a picture fell out, and broke, and a big nail scraped across the floor.\u201d<\/p>\n
While I went into the kitchen to moisten a paper towel, I gave Dondi an abbreviated version of my Douglas fir speech. Although it\u2019s classified as softwood, Douglas fir is really fairly hard, especially the old-growth heartwood. I returned and rubbed a little moisture into the scratch to see what it would look like with a clear finish. The damage didn\u2019t quite disappear, but it did become less visible. Add some stain, two coats of polyurethane, and the scratch would be all but unnoticeable.<\/p>\n
As for preventing further scratches, additional coats of finish would help deflect potential damage, but no finish, and no wood, is going to resist a blow from a nail. After all, that\u2019s what a nail is designed to do: puncture wood.<\/p>\n
I left Dondi with what I hoped would be some comforting advice (and a promise to refinish her floor while she was in Europe on tour): When people look at floors, their eyes are drawn more to the condition of the finish than the condition of the wood. That\u2019s why it\u2019s essential to maintain your finish. If not, you\u2019ll have to completely sand the floor \u2013 or replace it.<\/p>\n
That was the situation Darryl White and David Stephens were facing after they bought a 1930 Spanish house in Kensington. The floors had been sanded too many times (and rather poorly), and parts would need to be replaced. Darryl called Atlas Flooring. They determined that most of the floor, though worn thin, could still be sanded. Where the old and new floor joined, Atlas \u201claced\u201d the boards together so the transition wouldn\u2019t be obvious. <\/p>\n
Now there was the small matter of staining the floor to harmonize with the decorative fir trusses and baseboards I had recently refinished a medium reddish-brown color. I provided samples for Darryl to show the floor guys. A day later, Darryl called. He was a little stressed. Atlas doesn\u2019t use the stains I had provided. Could I come over and help him pick the right color?<\/p>\n
When I arrived, there were four swatches of stain on the newly sanded dining room floor. Of course, they looked nothing like the samples. Over the next hour, we tried mixing Antique Brown with Chestnut. Coffee with Antique Brown. Chestnut with Coffee. Each time we stepped back into the living room and looked through the arch into the dining room where the dozen or so samples were arrayed like so much spilled paint, I thought, \u201cGee there\u2019s a lot of floor here. And it\u2019s all so white! If you were to pick the wrong stain color, you could really screw things up!\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve made thousands of decisions about color \u2013 as a magazine editor, as a website editor, as a wood refinisher. My process has always been the same: trust my initial impression, consider the alternatives, squint a little, walk away if necessary, listen to the other creative people and then take a deep breath and make the call. And so that\u2019s what I did. Antique Brown. It harmonized with the base. Everything else was too yellow or two dark. <\/p>\n
An hour later we were still looking at the floor. In silence. Finally Darryl spoke. \u201cI guess you\u2019re waiting for me to make a decision.\u201d <\/p>\n
I nodded my head. Darryl decided to reach out for his lifeline.<\/p>\n
\u201cI better let David have a look,\u201d he said, pulling out his cell phone. <\/p>\n
When David arrived, he took one glance and said, \u201cWhat about this one?\u201d He was pointing at the Chestnut\/Coffee combination, or maybe it was the Coffee\/Chestnut combination.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not talking about that one,\u201d I said. \u201cIt\u2019s been removed from contention. Pretend it isn\u2019t there.\u201d I\u2019ll have to admit my manners were slipping a little. <\/p>\n
\u201cOkay, then,\u201d David said, perfectly reasonably. \u201cI like this one.\u201d He was pointing at the Antique Brown. \u201cThis looks good with the baseboards.\u201d <\/p>\n
It was a struggle not to hug him.<\/p>\n
In three days, when the floor is finished, I won\u2019t be at all surprised if it doesn\u2019t look anything like Antique Brown. But it will still be beautiful. That\u2019s the thing to keep in mind when you\u2019re dealing with a wood floor. No matter what, it will be beautiful. And if not, you can always walk on it.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Michael Good SDUN Columnist For some, a gleaming hardwood floor is the vintage home\u2019s crowning glory. For others, it\u2019s just that thing you walk on. Most old-house owners, however, fall somewhere in between \u2013 wood floors are beautiful, they\u2019re functional, but they\u2019re nothing to get too worked up about \u2013 until it\u2019s time to […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1306,"featured_media":243406,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11555","_seopress_titles_title":"House Calls: Hardwood floors cause for homeowner heartache","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11551,11555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-uptown-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1306"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}