Saturday, December 29, 2012

A "New" Floor and a Fun Discovery!


Tonight we ripped up the ugly blue wall-to-wall carpeting in the Twilight Room. Yuck. Good riddance! Blue is one of my favorite colors, but this rug had to be one of the most obnoxious things in the world! Especially when combined with the maroon, pink, and black that was on the walls when we bought it. Ick.


Our original plan for the room was to rip up the blue carpet and have someone come in and install new wall-to-wall carpeting, in a much more neutral color... off-white or a light tan or something. A couple years ago, R peeled up the carpet in the closet and discovered (sadly) that there was plywood underneath. It's a little strange that this is the one room in the house with wall-to-wall carpet, but we've found evidence that part of the room used to be a bathroom, so we assumed that the original floor must have been damaged by water or something.

Tonight we went through a wide range of emotions. When R started ripping up the carpet, he discovered that underneath 3/4 of the room was 2" wide maple flooring. It is in dire need of refinishing, but hey, it's better than carpeting! It'll look so much nicer than carpeting, in that it will somewhat match the rest of the house.
This new discovery was exciting for oh, about 5 minutes, until R got to the door and the 2" flooring ended and plywood began. The 2" flooring ran the whole length of the room except for 18" in front of the door. Still trying to be optimistic, we decided we'd just buy new 2" flooring, weave it in there and stain it all to match. Problem solved. Until we kept going and the plywood went all in front of the closet and into the closet and all along the back wall, about 3' into the room. Ugh. There was too much plywood for it to make sense to take it all up and install new 2" flooring. So we're back to let's just leave it and get new wall-to-wall carpeting.
While R was rolling up the carpet, I realized that the plywood/2" flooring was still about 3/4" taller than the floor in my office. So the plywood was on top of something that was level with the original flooring in the rest of the upstairs. So out came the crowbars. Underneath the plywood was flooring that matched and lined up with the flooring in my office. We got so excited! Who wants 2" flooring when the original wide board flooring is underneath!?! We kept going, tearing up a couple strips of the 2" flooring, to make sure the wide board flooring kept going. It did. That's also when we discovered this:
Between the 2" flooring and the original flooring are old newspapers from December 1942! So far we've found The New Britain Herald and The Hartford Courant. Some parts of the papers are really fragile and thin, and since we didn't know they were there, they got ripped. We're planning on being really careful in the rest of the room so we can keep it all.

There was also a hole in the floor, which we're planning on patching using some flooring from the attic. It's about the same size as the patched hole in the Guest Room floor, which we've guessed used to be a vent that brought heat into the Guest Room from the Dining Room after the GR fireplace was removed. Since the Twilight Room doesn't have a fireplace, we're assuming that there was another vent in here to bring heat into the room.

Another weird coincidence.... we were discussing the blue carpeting while R was tearing it up. When we moved in and I vacuumed it, it reacted like a brand new carpet would. I commented that it was like it had never been vacuumed before... like it had just been put in. When we were tearing it up tonight, I told R to be on the lookout for a sticker with an install date on it. My guess was 2008. Turns out I was right. Not only was it 2008, but creepily, it was March 6, 2008. Our baby's due date is March 6, 2013, exactly 5 years later. Creepy :)