This past winter, 2018, I finished installing reclaimed Douglas fir from my grandmother’s house into my new family room. It was easy and hard at the same time. What was hard:
Getting started;
Three trips to the farm to get more wood; and
Calculating board feet exactly, so that I did not have to trim length from any piece.
What was easy:
Installing it (despite my many complaints about a sore back).
It still needs to be sanded and refinished. I was going to do shellac and wax, the way it was done traditionally, but after seeing what my dog has done to the finish with his nails, I am going to go with something stronger and more durable.
Sorting by lengthI had to cut off a thousand nails ….First few coursesInstallation tools.
It is by no means perfect. But I did it, and I was able to reuse my grandmother’s flooring, which makes me very happy.
Floor installed. But look, my adorably cute dog with his stocking on Christmas morning!
And, obviously, it needs to be sanded and refinished. Someone else can do that part.
Here’s a close up of the old growth fir, tongue and groove – over 100 years old and it has never been sanded.
And, some historical information about the flooring – it came from a mill in Vancouver owned by John Hanbury. He had started out in Brandon, Manitoba, and eventually bought out other mills in British Columbia. This flooring is stamped from Vancouver.
Hanbury & Co. of Vancouver and Brandon J. Hanbury & Co. Mill, False Creek, BC. Taken from City of Vancouver Archives. My flooring came from here.
Here is some math done by the original installers:
I can’t tell what they were figuring out. Do you know?
The floor will have to wait until all the work is done on the main floor, because I intend to pull the walnut that is in the original part of the house and use it upstairs. Then, I will refinish the original fir on the main floor. That’s waaaaay down the line, so I’ll have to live with subfloor for a while in the bedroom.
I’m using doors, windows, trim, and flooring from my grandmother’s house (which is now abandoned). This is the door for the powder room, which is a pocket door.
Since the doors are shellacked, I merely wiped down the door and added a couple of new coats of shellack and it looks wonderful.
Before
After
Before
After
Then I installed it (definitely a two person job) and discovered that the effing builder had used drywall screws too long for the pocket space, such that when the door slid into the pocket it was scratched by the screws.
This is a 100 year old door, in mint condition. It survived 100 years of use in a family of 5 and my builder scars it with his effing malicious idiocy.
So, I had to dig out the screws from the already taped/mudded drywall and replace them with shorter screws.
My grandparents were farmers. My grandmother’s family were original pioneers and were the first to break and farm their land. When my grandparents married, they lived in a large 1 1/2 story kit or catalogue house. It had a large kitchen, dining room, and living room, a small bathroom, and three 120 square foot bedrooms on the main, as well as an east facing sun porch. Upstairs were three small bedrooms and lots of closets. The reason I think it is a kit or catalogue house is because some of the salvaged trim has handwriting on it indicating it was shipped in its finished form to Springwater, ergo not built on site. I’ve tried to find the plan online, but no luck so far.
Grandma’s House
View from the sunporch
Like a lot of people do, I spent much time out at the farm and it became a part of me. Weekends, summer holidays, Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and when I could drive and between jobs I would spend weeks of time out there.
I never imagined a time when it wouldn’t be ‘my farm’. But that happened about 20 years ago when my grandparents moved off the farm and into the city. They turned their backs on the house and gave the land to their son, who also turned his back on the house (and the whole home quarter). Now my cousin owns it and he reports that he hasn’t been out there for a decade or more, despite it being just a couple miles from his place.​
Anyway, I took my son out there for a picnic last summer and showed the house to him. The roof was leaking and, inevitably, someone had shot out most of the windows, so the house was rife with swallows and other wildlife. A skunk had been trapped inside and died at one point. Strangers had been in and out of the house, each spreading the garbage my grandma left behind wider and wider. Do they really think she would have left anything of value behind? No, it’s all garbage. Newspapers, magazines, empty boxes. But each trespasser must look and spread and ensure it all gets soaked and ruins the house. They don’t even bother to close the doors when they leave.
Mess in the kitchen
Mess in the dining room
Mess in the living room
Mess in a bedroom
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I stewed on that all winter. It was a beautiful house at one time. It was a home. It housed my many splendid memories of being with my grandparents and the farm. It causes me a lot of pain to see the house and the farmyard the way it is now. Unloved. Unappreciated. All the work my grandparents put into it is now lost.​
I stopped in again two weeks ago and saw that since I was there the previous summer someone had been in and started stripping the fir trim from the living and dining rooms. I became obsessed with this. For a whole week I obsessed. Finally my sister encouraged me to call our cousin and ask about taking the trim for myself. I’d wanted to do it for a year, but had a serious ethical dilemma about removing the trim from what was otherwise a beautiful intact house. I couldn’t see at that time that it was beyond salvation. All I could see was that the house deserved to remain intact.
​Anyway, I was finally so upset that I was compelled to call my cousin. He sounded surprised that a stranger had been in the house, although acknowledging that he hadn’t been out there for a decade, and casually told me ‘fill my boots’ with the trim.
I went out a couple of days later and stripped almost the entire house. It took two days. My son came the first day and I was glad for his help and company. The second day was lonelier.
The dilemma plagued me the entire time – how wrong it was to take away part of the heritage of this home – but by the middle of the second day of I realized that the holes in the roof had irreparably harmed the structure and floors, such that it would never be habitable again. I found some peace and was anxious to finish the job and leave.
​I boarded up the broken glass in the exterior door and installed a padlock, and stapled poly on each main floor window. The swallows and bees will have to find a new home. I was not confident going upstairs to poly the windows because the floor looked too sketchy to stand on. But I put a sheet of plywood over the entrance to the upstairs so that no kids would head up there and get hurt.
I plan to go back for some trim I didn’t have time to take off. Also, there is still hundreds of square feet of beautiful fir flooring that is possibly salvageable and which I intend to have. I’ll have to hire someone to come with me though, as it’s backbreaking work to get it off.
But let me give an example of what I now have for my own addition: Old growth fir – baseboards (8″ high and some 18 ‘ long!), plinths, cornices, door and window casings, picture rails, doors with hinges (I have to go back for the jambs), windows, and about 100 square feet of flooring (I have to go back for the rest).
Beautiful old growth Douglas fir floors
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Windows
More windows
Sunporch windows
None of it was ever painted, only shellacked. It’s beautiful. I’m at peace for having taken it and I will be appreciating it for years to come.
While spending time in this house with a view to architecture, which is something I didn’t do as a young person, and while taking the trim, I saw that this was a very well built and maintained house. The concrete basements are in perfect condition, the walls and floors are square and level, the windows open and close as designed, and the trim and flooring is in immaculate condition. This is a roughly 100 year old house that is, aside from the effects of the broken windows and holey roof, in perfect condition. It could have housed many families after my grandparents left, including my family, had it been cared for properly. Deep sadness for me.
