Floors

The floors in our house are old southern yellow pine.  This refers to a group of pine species that include loblolly pine (Pinus taeda), longleaf pine (P. palustris), shortleaf pine (P. echinata), and slash pine (P. ellioti).  It is assumed that in a house as old as ours, the pine was harvested locally (in South Florida) and is often referred to as "Dade County Pine."  This is a botanical variation known as P. ellioti var densa, or "South Florida Slash Pine."  At any rate, the floors are in pretty good shape, but need a few boards replaced and a refinish.  This wouldn't be such a big deal if the wood wasn't so nice and old.

 Here you can see one board in the middle where there is grain runout and over time and traffic, and probably some overzealous sanding.  Next to that are some nice, straight-grained boards.  The straight grain comes from lumber that is quarter-sawn and the grain is vertical on a cross section.  Grain runout occurs on wood that is flat sawn, and the grain is more horizontal on cross section.  I stole this diagram from the internet:

  
Quarter sawn lumber produces nicer wood, but leads to more waste, so it is more valuable.  Boards like the one I pictured above would have probably survived the 80 or so years if they had been put in low-traffic areas.  But since they were in the middle of the room (there are probably 11 boards total between the dining room and living room), they wore out eventually.  Here's a closeup:

Replacing boards isn't terribly complicated, but can be difficult to do without damaging adjacent boards.  What is complicated, though is finding lumber to match this old, beautiful wood.  The solution?  Use old, beautiful wood.

It turns out that while very little South Florida Slash Pine exists anymore, there are people reclaiming it from old buildings, re-milling it, and selling it as flooring, paneling, etc.  I found one such company in Fort Lauderdale, the Old Florida Lumber Company.  This is a small operation with some very helpful people running it.  They are going to mill up the boards I need to exact dimensions and even use photographs of the floor to match it as well as possible.  So cool!

After repairing, then comes refinishing.  Boy, I could go on about that for a while, but I will just say that I am leaning towards oiling the floor with a mixture of Linseed, Turpentine, and Varnish.  I may even mix it myself.  I really like the idea of the easy application, and should damage occur, reapplication.  Stay tuned!

New plumbing!!

One of the first things we noticed about the house was that our water pressure was very, very low.  The kitchen sink barely even dripped!  Everything else came out as a trickle.  We deduced (i.e. were told by people who know these things) that our old galvanized plumbing had corroded (which occurs from the inside-out) and had dramatically narrowed from 1" diameter.  Well, this certainly turned out to be true:

That's not mud in there, that's solid corrosion, or mineral deposit, or something....gross!  There were other pipes in worse shape (sorry a little out of focus):

In Michigan, getting to the water supply between the city water meter and your house would be a huge undertaking, probably requiring the renting or hiring of large equipment to do some digging.  Not  here in Florida!  Nothing freezes, so they bury pipes less than three feet in the ground.  I was able to dig most of the old pipe up within a couple of hours.  Here's the pipe where it enters the house, the white pvc is just a sprinkler line running along the house; you can barely see the old water main in the dirt.  The shutoff valve is barely visible behind the sprinkler head:

The other thing that would never happen in Michigan is being able to crawl  under your house and access all your plumbing!  (unless you had a basement or something)  In our house, all of the pipes are hanging from the floor joists.  Fortunately, the previous owners had replaced all of the galvanized line that led into the house, so we only had replace the main line that ran about 40' in a straight line from the front of the house towards the back.  We wouldn't have gotten anywhere without the help and advice from our buddy Kevin, pictured here under the house, with his two sons, Owen and Miles.  He pretty much rules.

Along with Kevin and the boys, you can see the old line lying on the ground while a new section of pvc is in place.

This is the entrance we used, you can see the new shutoff valve and hose bib.  Closeup to follow:

Here's part of the finished product, the new pvc line ready to be buried:

Here's the new ball valve and hose bib.  Looks awesome!!!

Crawling around under the house was dirty!!  It took a long time to scrub away this crud!:

Here's some more random photos:

Moving

We finished moving out of our apartment this weekend, and piled all of our belongings in the garage.  We are planning on extensive interior painting and refinishing the floors, we decided to leave the house as empty as possible.

Here's our apartment partway through packing:

Here's all of our stuff piled in our new garage!

Daisy watches over

Closing

We finally ended this bizarre process last week and closed on our house! Just to give you an idea of how prolonged this ended up being, we submitted our contract in early July! As a matter of fact, I even signed over power of attorney to Karin so that she could sign in my absence....on August 5th!!! Forty-two days later we finally got it done.

Despite the ups and downs, we felt very fortunate throughout the entire process. We got excellent advice every step of the way from people that we trust and we received unwavering support from some very dear friends and family.

Here are some of the most flattering pictures of the house, its a roomy three bedroom, three bath. Built sometime between 1925 and 1930 (maybe Karin can clear that up, I've read two or three different things!), it is in excellent shape structurally.... but needs a lot of cosmetic work. It was abandoned by the previous owners, removed of its appliances, and appears to have been lived in by squatters for an undetermined amount of time (yikes!!). Needless to say the potential is endless for some new owners with lots of determination and creativity!!

We'll be working on the interior for at least two weeks before we move in, so stay tuned as we document the transformation! The less-than-flattering pictures will follow shortly! (Click on each picture to see larger version)

That's Judy Biglin on the front porch, our AWESOME real estate agent.