Our primary staircase consists of a few steps up to a platform or landing, part of which is cantilevered out over the main building’s foundation. We usually call this the “pop-out”, though I’m sure there are many other architectural terms for it. The pop-out provides the necessary space to turn 180 degrees before ascending the longer run of steps. In other words, the a roughly 3′ × 4′ section of this platform is inside the foyer, and another 9′ × 3′ section, which includes a small coat closet, is in the cantilevered pop-out.
The house has been through so many transformations over the years, and the floor tells the story. The pop-out floor, which has settled significantly and now slopes away from the rest of the room, is the beautiful face-nailed quarter sawn white oak in many of the other principal rooms at Bonebrake (inexplicably 1-49/64″ wide and installed circa 1910). Beneath this face-nailed strip is what was both the house’s original subfloor and finished floor: 3/4″ tongue-and-groove heart pine, installed directly across the floor joists.
The 3′ × 4′ part of the platform, inside the foyer, framed in the 1980s, had a plywood subfloor and more recent 1-1/2″-wide plain-sawn tongue-and-groove oak strip, certainly also dating to the 1980s but showing its age much more than the century-old q/s flooring adjacent to it. Although this was all supposed to be one platform and one consistent floor surface, structural and historical differences between these sections caused it to look really junky and odd. Unmatched flooring materials required a few strips of perpendicular boards to “disguise” the seam. Here’s what it looked like before I tore out the 1980s strip a few weeks ago:
It’s been my goal to unify the flooring if possible, so yesterday I started carefully removing the exposed q/s boards. Believe it or not, it worked better than I expected! Over 90% of what I removed should be salvageable and reusable.
As expected, I found heart pine subfloor underneath. The two boards right at the edge—where the pop-out meets the house’s foundation—were loose and gappy due to 140 years of settling, but otherwise they looked beautiful. Fascinatingly, they appear to have been “grained” (the common Victorian practice of painting inexpensive wood to look like something different and usually costlier). If I’m right that the q/s boards went in around 1910, that means these pine floors were only lived on for about 20 years—30 at most. This graining is nicely done, but it was not seen by human eyes for very long. (The “wood grain” visible in this picture is not the heart pine; it’s the painted graining that is flaking off. Even weirder, below the delicate graining is an independent layer of solid brownish-orange paint. So this floor was almost certainly painted twice in its short stint as a finished surface.) Today people pay exorbitant amounts of money for salvaged heart pine flooring… the material that’s functioning as a subfloor throughout this home, considered cheap and rough when it was installed.
Next I need to unify the gappy seam and re-lay boards. More on that later.