Our 80 year old house remodel is slowly but surely becoming a home. The projects are getting smaller for now, as we get ready to move to the other side of the house, although that won’t last. Join us for these projects in our 80 year old house addition.
My daughter said, “Why did we wait so long to have wood accents in the house?!” She was talking about the flooring for our old house remodel addition. Of course, she might be biased because she installed a lot of the floor by herself.
But I don’t think so. I really like this flooring. It is LVP (luxury vinyl plank) flooring by Kennedy Flooring, Nature’s Impression, in Pawnee Pecan. It is a click together, floating floor.
This flooring is medium brown with lots of grain and variation in colour, giving a great rustic vibe. The wood trim that I stained in the last post is a great match. We are installing it with the top and bottom casings perpendicular, straight across, instead of mitered at 45°, also for that rustic, country look.
That does mean I have to finish the ends in the same way as the rest of the board, which, as you remember, is a multiple step process. Meanwhile, the husband is anxious to get working on other projects, which require preliminary work by me, so there they sit.
Life goes on. The garden is all put in. The kids are still working on school (homeschool!) – we’ve had a few other projects on the go… so they’ve learned how to put in flooring, practiced painting, using a drill, and the like.
Another small house project was to stain the ceiling of the porch. The tongue and groove is pine, so over time it will yellow, and I’m not going for that 80’s yellow lacquered pine look. It’s my turn to climb on a ladder on the back of the truck!
Another staining project, another experiment – I had some tongue and groove stored in the basement, left over from installing the porch ceiling in the fall. So I tested my stains on this piece. Now, you already know where I’m going with this.
A piece of wood sitting out over winter, and a piece stored in the basement for the same time period apparently absorb stain differently. The outdoor wood will be a lot drier. So once I did my test stain and went to stain the ceiling – SURPRISE – the stain looks a lot more like dark walnut than any special walnut stain sample anywhere.
Well, it still looks good, just a little darker than expected – like dark walnut instead of weathered pine I was going for.
I finished the tongue and groove with Minwax water based Helmsman Spar Urethane in clear satin. Spar urethane is designed for marine application, and is supposed to be very durable, not cracking with moisture and temperature differences. Water based urethanes resist yellowing. Satin because I don’t do shiny.
Here is a little treasure one of the kids dug up from the basement gravel pile. This limestone is covered in shell fossils! Super cool.
Well, there they are – a few semi-finished projects in the midst of our 80 year old house remodel. You’ll have to stick around to see how they turn out with some finishing details.
Here are a few more related posts you might like:
80 Year Old House Remodel 11 – Finishing Trim
80 Year Old House Remodel 6 – Floor Plan
80 Year Old House Remodel 2 – Demolition
I'm Erika, I live on eighty acres in the northern prairies of southern Manitoba with my husband and four kids. Here, we enjoy the outdoors and try to be more self sufficient as we try new things in the garden and learn about our land and the world around us.
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