Fancy Floors

We live in a 120 year old house...that I absolutely adore...but there are some things that I don't particularly love. Within the first 3 minutes in our house I knew it was mine.. I didn't have this feeling with any other house... I walked through it and said where do I sign. I could picture family parties in the backyard and dinner parties in the dining room.... but it's been loved....and it's old....and it's had some inhabitants in the past that maybe thought they were a little more handy than they were...and so it was officially time to re-do the hardwood floors. I thought about not even sharing this because once we moved out all of our fun rugs and pretty furniture, the floors looked even worse.... it was like one of those things where you pass something every day that eventually you don't even notice it anymore..or when you drive home from work and wonder how the heck you got home...please tell me this has happened to you too? But they were bad. With a capital Bad.

Anywhoo.....the time had come to roll up our sleeves, move out literally every piece of furniture to the garage/basement/second floor, move out out of our house and turn they keys over to our entrusted floor guy to get started.... Here are the terrible, old, at some point someone rented their own sander and sanded against the grain, worn out floors:

You can see here where someone used the sander in the wrong direction. Sanding 101 FAIL

We call this the "parquet room" I hated this room and wanted to rip it out and make it match the rest of the house, but the floor guy convinced us it would look cool and to leave it....

multi-colored, cracked and put in terrible at the addition

cracked transition and mismatched/mis-colored parquet...turrible.

And now for the afters (cue angel chorus)

That parquet shined up like a new penny! Floor Guy was totally right and saved us some major money...
 It's so pretty now!

Do you remember this transition? Probably not..let me refresh your memory...

This was one of those "why did we wait 2.5 years to do this" kind of projects...and it looks fantastic!
I am totally obsessed with how new our house looks and it also inspired a few other projects that perhaps I need to share.... I haven't shared any house posts in a long while...

What do you think? Such a difference right? He said ours was in the top 5 restorations he thinks he's done....which probably just means ours were in some of the worst shape he's seen...but I'll still take it as a compliment :)

EDIT: Since people have been asking and since he did such a fabulous job, I would highly recommend our flooring guy Keith from Buckeye Wood Floors, who was extremely reasonably priced, did a great job and maybe most importantly, we trusted him with the keys to our house while we moved across town for the week. He bids out the work and he does the jobs with his assistant. We had one company convince us that our only hope was to rip out all of the floors and start from scratch but right away Keith said that was not necessary..saving us thousands of dollars and also restoring the houses ORIGINAL floors which was really important to me. So yes, Keith is awesome.