The underlay came up in orange crumbs and the first thing I did was sneeze. By 10.20am on Sunday 4 January the hall carpet was rolled against the front door, we were both in dust masks, and Matt said what you say when a floor you've only seen the corner of turns out to be all of it: "Oh. That's a lot of floor."
We'd known it was there since our first fortnight, when I peeled back one corner of the carpet by the front door and a herringbone of woodblocks looked up at me. It took until January to get round to it. The hall is only about 3.5 m², but it contains several hundred blocks, each roughly the size of a bar of chocolate, and they'd been under carpet since long before the 2006 windows went in.
What was under there
Pulling out the gripper rods and about two hundred staples took the whole morning. Underneath, most of the blocks were sound, dull and grey with decades of grime, with small nail holes along the edges where the rods had been. A patch by the front door was a mess: about twenty blocks loose enough to lift with a fingernail, and nine gaps where someone had long ago filled the space with a square of hardboard.
In the gaps and under the loose blocks was the old black adhesive, glossy in places and cracked in others. Old black adhesive of this kind can contain asbestos, so we decided the whole job would be done without disturbing it. No sanding, no grinding, no scraping, not even a gentle go to get a block to sit flatter. If you want a woodblock floor sanded back, a specialist will test the adhesive first, and that's the person to ring. We decided we'd rather have a floor with some character than a floor with a lab bill.
Mending it without sanding
The loose blocks were the easy part. Each one went back into its own space with a dab of flexible parquet adhesive on the back, pressed down and weighted with bags of topsoil left over from the raised beds. The label said it could go over old adhesive that was sound, so we didn't touch the black stuff on either side. We left them overnight, and then did a second batch.
The nine gaps were harder. A bag of 24 reclaimed blocks turned up on Marketplace for £38, from someone across the city who had lifted his own hall floor. We checked the backs were clean wood before handing over any money. They were about 2 mm thicker than ours, so Matt planed the top faces of nine of them at the shed workbench, checking against a straight edge after every few strokes. Never the backs. They looked pale and new beside the originals until the oil went on, and then they sat much closer.
Cleaning came next, on weekday evenings. A well-wrung damp cloth and a capful of mild floor cleaner, working along the herringbone, then a dry towel straight after. The first cloth came back the colour of strong tea. Wet cloths on old wood make me nervous, so I wrung mine out until it was barely damp, and Matt wrung it again.
The oil, and the mistake
On Saturday 17 January we put on the hardwax oil. The tin wanted at least 15°C and the hall managed 13°C that morning, so we ran the heating with the front room door open and waited until two in the afternoon. I applied it with a pad, and I applied far too much in the first go, so it stayed tacky for two days. Buffing it with dry cloths on Sunday evening sorted it out, but if I did it again I'd keep to thin coats. Matt's verdict on the whole job was "You can always add more, you can't take it off", which is also his view on most things in the shed.
The second coat went on, thinly, on Monday evening, and we stayed off it in socks until Thursday. The total came to £96: reclaimed blocks £38, oil £34, adhesive, pads, cloths and masks £24.
The hall now echoes. A cough comes back at you from the stairs. On Thursday evening Pickle took it at a gallop for the first time, and the sound of her claws on the blocks was like somebody drumming a pencil on a table. She stopped halfway, looked at the floor and then at me.
