Fourth Ave Restoration
Early in May the baby and I were sent away for the weekend while Ryan started working on the 2nd floor hardwood. The plan sounded perfect, while we went to Virginia to visit my sister and family…
….he would tear up the old floors in the hall and master bedroom, put down new sub-floors, and put down the new hardwood floors.
Plans never do work out. Needless to say he barely got our bedroom done—not for lack of effort. We all slept in the basement Sunday night but by Monday night we were moving back into our rooms. Luckily the floors are finally level and beautiful!
{Before}
{After}
At least Ryder is enjoying them.
Since then we’ve got the hall level and hopefully will get the new floors in this weekend.
Yippeee! The main floor has all new hardwood floors. I love that it goes so well with the existing molding and also looks more modern with the exotic wood variation. We just need to finish trimming the baseboards and we will be done with this floor!
Well, we still have not ordered the wood floors (hint: I think we’re going with Brazilian Teak). If you follow me on Pinterest, you may have noticed I’ve been dreaming of painting the floors. In an effort to save money, we thought we’d test this out on the kitchen. The floors were not original, but they are yellow pine and had not been sanded down in decades. Maybe floor paint will stand up to the dogs better than staining? Who knows. And if it doesn’t work, we just replace them.
It took longer than expected because the floor paint requires overnight drying, making this a slow process.
So we started by doing a light sanding.
Then we primed and did three coats of the base (white).
Then the fun part…taping out a square pattern. (Ryan was up very late doing this-love ya honey).
And the big reveal!
I love it! But I will caution anyone trying this. Make sure the base coat dries for like a week. We waited 48 hours but when we pulled up the tape it still took off some layers of white. 
Happy New Year everyone! As you can imagine, this little edition…
has really slowed down the progress of our renovation. Yet, Ryan has still managed to keep moving forward. Recently we decided that we’d used these next few cold months to start tearing up the old floors inside. (this couldn’t happen soon enough because Ryder will be crawling before we know it!)
We took up the original pine and sub-floors.
The joists definitely were not level so we had to sister additional 2x8s to strengthen the floors.
I even got in on the action.
And now we have new plywood sub-floors.
Time to decide on the new hardwood to be installed. You’d think I had been dreaming of this long enough that I would be prepared. But I can’t seem to decide the best way to modernize the house but also maintain its roots. Lighter or darker?
We’ve looked at White Oak.
And Golden Teak.
And Brazilian Teak.
I’ve been to Lumber Liquidators a dozen times, but now I think I need to start considering darker tones like Mahogany and Maple Cherry. Any other suggestions?
(One thing has become clear to me…I think we’ll need to selectively paint some of this Pine Trim. Ryan is so thrilled about this new project.)
This is the story of a young couple that got married, moved to New Jersey, and started restoring a 115 year old Victorian in Atlantic Highlands. We're excited to share with you the challenges, ideas (good and bad), and progress of our little home by the sea.
