Glouster County NJ pine floor refinishing

This was a fun hardwood refinishing project for us. The homeowner had installed unfinished reclaimed pine in his Glouster County, New Jersey home. It had been sourced from 100+ year old barns and milled into flooring. We were called in to add the finishing touches and refinish it.

The project was a brand new construction. Roughly 1,200 square feet had to be refinished throughout the ground floor, including the living room, office and hallways. This project was different than our standard hardwood floor refinishing projects because we had to hand scrape the floor and not use our regular floor sanding machines.

Project details...

The homeowners wanted a very rustic, barn-look floor. They loved the character in the reclaimed pine flooring. It was full of saw blade markings and chatter from the milling done 100 years ago. We were asked to leave as much of that character as we possibly could.

In the above left photo you can see the floor just after installation. If you look closely you’ll notice quite a few boards are much lower than others. The solid wood had been glued and nailed to the sub-floor so there was no way to raise them. Because of the tripping hazard, we had to scrape these down to even them out a bit. In the photo on the right you can see the beginnings of a full couple of days of hand scraping.

The above left pic shows the results of a full days effort of hand-scraping. Yes, our knees and forearms were sore afterwards! It was worth the effort though. On the right is the finished result a light sand with a buffer and 2 coats of our Gold Finish System.

Above are some closer photos of the beautiful character marks throughout the floor. It looks even better in real life. We really love this floor.

Below is a bigger photo of the living area all finished…

While hand-scraped reclaimed floors look amazing, one of the drawbacks is that they can’t be sanded in the traditional way. If we put our big floor sanding machines on this floor and sanded it down, we’d remove the beautiful character of the floor. So, with this limitation, it means down the road when the finish starts to wear, it will be more difficult to restore them.

Because of this issue, we suggested a hardwax/modern penetrating oil finish system. This system allows us to refresh the oil after a period of time, without having to re-sand the floor. The homeowner gets a new protective coat every few years AND they get to keep the character!

We really enjoyed this project. It was a nice change from our regular hardwood floor sanding schedule. Although if we did this everyday we’d have arms like Popeye!