Let's Play a Game

I have a fun game for you. It's a guessing game. Any number can play. Let's begin.

Here is a picture of a wood floor. How many staples do you see in the floor? Take your time...

Do you see five staples? Ten? Fifty? More than that?

The answer is: We don't know! See? It really is a guessing game! You get to find them all without seeing them first. Kathy and I play this game for hours.

I wish we could recycle staples for a penny apiece. We'd be rich! Instead, we just dump 'em in the trash along with the broken tack strips, the dust, and the shredded padding.

Here's another guessing game. What were the previous owners doing in this picture? My guess is that they were spray-painting a piece of furniture. See where the two round legs and two rectangular legs were standing? It must be fun to spray paint things in the middle of your own bedroom. Later, they must have set a paint can down on the floor, in two separate places. It sure left a nice ring for posterity.

Underneath all the unintentional paint is a solid layer of dark brown. And under that is another layer of brown paint in a slightly lighter color. As far as we can tell, the floor in all these upstairs rooms was painted brown, twice, before giving up on it and laying carpet -- also twice.

When we removed all the carpet staples, we found that some of them had little pieces of green padding trapped under them. But we've never seen any green padding, so our guess is these were left over from an earlier carpet job. So between the two coats of brown paint and the two layers of carpet, this floor has been refinished at least four times in its 120+ years. Not surprising, I guess.

The wood itself is inch-thick redwood tongue-and-groove. No knots anywhere. The boards are 5-1/4 inches wide and have a rough finish underneath but a fairly smooth finish on top. Or at least, they did. Years of abuse have gouged the top surface pretty badly, so now it's dented in places, as if they were juggling bowling balls up here. A few of the boards have been cut away to expose something underneath, but it's not always obvious what they were trying to get to. One opening exposes the ceiling fixture in the room below, but a couple don't have any obvious purpose. We'll keep thinking on that.

The floorboards also change direction in odd places. They'll run north/south for a while, then change to east/west orientation in the middle of the hallway, for example, or partway through a room. Our assumption is that the current walls weren't here in 1893, and that the walls have been moved since -- perhaps multiple times. It doesn't make sense to change the orientation of the floorboards arbitrarily unless the underlying joists change there, too. Hmmm... something else to explore.