Hardwood floors in Port Townsend

Port Townsend is a National Historic Landmark district and its floors show it. Uptown and the downtown blocks are full of 1880s and 1890s Queen Anne and Italianate houses whose original floors are old-growth Douglas fir — twenty and thirty growth rings to the inch, cut from timber that no longer exists. There is no replacing that stock. There is only keeping it.

Balloon frames and missing subfloors

A good number of the oldest houses here were balloon-framed with the fir laid straight onto the joists, no subfloor underneath. That single fact changes everything about a refinish: less mass under the machine, more deflection between joists, boards that telegraph every framing bay. We sand those floors with a lighter cut and a slower pass, and we do not chase perfect flatness across a room that has never been flat.

Patina is not damage

The commonest mistake on a historic fir floor is sanding it until it looks new. New is the one thing it cannot look. Fir has soft early wood between hard rings, so an aggressive cut leaves a washboard, and a hundred and thirty years of colour in the surface goes to the dust bag in one pass.

We sand to sound wood and stop. Boards that need replacing get patched with matched stock so the repair reads as part of the floor rather than as a patch. A patch cut from new-growth stock announces itself for the rest of the floor’s life; a patch cut from old fir disappears in a year.

Carpet, and what is under it

Half our local calls begin with someone pulling up wall-to-wall from the 1970s. Underneath: fir, tack-strip holes around the perimeter, staple scars, sometimes a border of unfinished “carpet strip” where a rug once sat. All of it is repairable, and almost all of it is worth repairing. Bring us in before the carpet goes in the skip — occasionally the pad has been protecting a floor that needs nothing but a recoat.

Marine air

Nineteen inches of rain a year, but the air off the strait is persistently damp and many crawlspaces here have never had a ground vapour barrier. We take moisture readings in the crawlspace as well as the room, and we say plainly when a floor needs a dry season before it needs a machine.

Beyond the historic district

Cape George, Kala Point, Marrowstone Island, Discovery Bay, Chimacum and our own Port Hadlock bring a different set of floors — 1970s through 2000s oak strip, prefinished bevel-edge, and engineered over crawlspace. Different work, same first question: does this floor need a sand, or does it need a recoat?