Patching and removing wood floors

Well today I decided to pull up some of my wood flooring that had been damaged by termites. I went online and read a few articles on the 'how to do's' of replacing floor boards. It seemed easy enough, drill a few holes and then use the handy circular saw to cut a few lines down the board, then you just pry up and voila - a hole in the floor! In reality, I drilled the holes, then used the circular saw only to hit the nails that were used to secure the floor boards in the first place. Then after totally screwing my circular saw, I tried to pry the board up. Too bad the board came up in only pieces and I had to scrape and dig to get every bit out. Even then I still need to use a chisel to straighten the good board with the holes I drilled in. But eventually I got a few boards up. Now onto the successful part of the day. Patching holes that termites made. WOOHOO! Well after the tremendous amount of time it took to take up one board, I started to dread thinking about pulling up all the boards that have been damaged. So I decided I would try to patch some areas that weren't that badly damaged. I took a piece of wood that I had previously pull out and I started to scrape it into the shape I needed to patch the board with. The area isn't all that big, so it was a good practice piece. It didn't take long to shave off a little at a time until I got the right size. After I was done, I just plopped the sucker into the hole and I was pretty happy with the end results. Here are some pictures of the wood pulling and patching. Enjoy!

Anyone know where I can get old flooring?

Well I am almost complete in stripping the old glue off my living room floor and am getting ready to sand afterwards, but before I do that I need to get some replacement flooring for my floors. Some of the wood peices have been eaten away by those darn pesky termites. I can't wonder why God ever decided to make those things, I'm assuming it was actually Satan himself who created these buggers. He loves to enjoy watching us new old home owners rip up the carpet only to find millenia linoleum under it. Then pull that up only to find that the wood flooring under that has been ravaged by his creations. Anyways I was wondering if anyone knew of a website or some place in Florida where I could get salvaged old wood flooring. Mine are 2.5 inch old heart pine and I want to finish them with some shellac or maybe poly, depends how old I want to go. But if anyone can lead me to the right direction, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks a lot!

Riverside/Avondale Home Tour Review

Well this past weekend was the Riverside/Avondale Home Tour. They had 10 buildings on the tour, but only 7 were actual homes. Also out of those 7 homes 2 were not even close to being finished, so that actually left 5 homes to be viewed, which was pretty disappointing. Not the say that the 2 houses were in bad shape, I can see the beauty in them when finished, but to have them on a home tour??? Why??? There was nothing to see. One home was actually just frames with no walls, just wires and duct work. It was just a skeleton of itself. Onwards to the other 5 homes, as you can tell I didn't take any photos, because I was overly impressed with any of the homes. All the homes had a great looking exterior, but once inside they were all pretty bland. (A note some of the backyards were wonderful though.) So I was pretty disappointed this year, but one house that was very interesting was the Mediterranean style home, with original stuccoed walls, high high coffered ceilings and dark woodwork. The house was amazing until you went into the kitchen, where it fell into a restorers nightmare. The kitchen had been overhauled and had pale woodwork, which didn't match at all to the dark woodwork throughout the house, but that house was by far the highlight of the tour. I guess I was hoping to see homes back to their original beauty, but I did realize that it is of modern times and people need to renovate their homes to match their livelyhood. All in all it was an ok home tour, they had a much better one last year. Of course they did have one house which I didn't actually lookat because they had so many stuffed animals in there. Lions, tigers and bear OH MY!!!