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When we first moved into the house, we quickly threw self stick tile onto the second floor rear bathroom.  We did not pay much attention to the floor other than to note it was incredibly dirty.  What we did not realize until the rebuild, is that under our tile lurked an oak floor with mahogany trim.   Unfortunately, when repairs were done sometime in the 1940's, a big chunk of the oak floor was removed and never replaced. 

Now we were faced with a decision...lay something over the floor to hide the repairs we were making, or somehow replace the missing oak and mahogany.  

There were several ways we could have gone:  Pergo flooring was serious consideration.  This type of flooring is pre-finished and I am told goes down pretty easy.  We did have some reservations about wood in a bathroom, but heh, this bathroom already had wood floors.  This struck us as really odd.  When we pulled the original floor plans for our 1895 house, we discovered that our bathroom was suppose to be a shared closet for two second floor bedrooms.  It was never intended as a bathroom.  That explained the oak and mahogany flooring.  

Ceramic tile was also considered as well as single sheet vinyl covering.  It just kept coming back to how beautiful that oak flooring could look. Of course, we decided to go with the near impossible...replace the stuff that had been trashed years ago.  No big deal really if the oak flooring was the kind of stuff you find in the "floor" section of your local home improvement center.  Our oak flooring is only 3/8" thick  by a true 2" wide and up to 8 feet long.  The grain is so "tight" that it must be near 200 years old.  It is also quarter sawn to highlight the subtle grain changes. Find that at your local lumber yard.

This picture shows the existing several hundred year old wood to your left.  A thin mahogany strip is new as is the wood to the right.  Note the difference in the grain.  Fortunately, we were able to do some careful staining to get the colors to match pretty close.

Now here is the truly amazing part of this whole story....I had the wood I needed in the basement and did not know it.  

A few years ago someone gave me a couple of boxes of mixed drawer parts, all made of perfectly clear white oak.  The pieces were the correct thickness, but pretty short and with either pins or tails at each end for a dovetail connection.   It took a lot of table saw and band saw work, but I managed to get exactly the right number of pieces to cover that big hole in the floor.  While the oak took some doing, I was just not sure where to get mahogany that would match the existing trim.  About a day later I was walking toward the band saw when my foot hit a piece of wood sticking out of a stack against the wall.  Not being too stressed out by all this mess, I grabbed the offending stick and was about to toss it someone near Jupiter....when it hit me that the stick was dark mahogany!  To this day, I have no idea where it came from, but I can tell you when I needed a second chunk of mahogany, there it was at the bottom of the same stack of wood. 

We carefully stained the new wood to match the old as best we could.  I took great care in sanding and applying the first coat.  For some reason, I missed a little patch on the second coat.

On the second coat of Polyshades pecan stain, I simply missed a patch about 18 inches long and two boards wide.  I, of course, discovered this as I was about to turn off the light and close the door.  For a moment, I actually considered stepping onto the new toilet, then to the sink, and finally into the tub.  Once there I could balance on the edge of the tub while I slapped a quick coat of stain over the missed area.  Then I envisioned me falling to the still semi-wet floor, only to lay there, writhing about like an insect on fly paper.  Instead, I put the brush in a sealed bag, waited 'til the next day, then carefully applied a coat to match the surrounding area.  Leave the acrobatics to the circus. 

How stupid can a person get? Well, pretty dumb.  I used floor stain that I found in the basement instead of buying a new can.  There was a little half pint can, but just the right color to match the old and new oak flooring.  So I used it.  Guess what happened when I went to the home center for another can????  You got it.  They don't even make it any more.

Then there was the wall....

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