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When I was on maternity leave in 2022 I embarked on probably my biggest project to date: relaying a reclaimed parquet floor from my old maths classroom.
Our house was built in 1899 and in 1902 a school was built next door. This is the school I attended but it was demolished in 2021.
In the 2000s, decades before we bought our cottage, downstairs was extended. Although it looks in-keeping with the age of the property on the outside it didn’t on the inside. We decided we’d make this a playroom as it’s an awkward space attached to our home office.
I wanted to put down wooden flooring because the rest of our downstairs is floorboards, but I struggled to find anything with the same age and patina.
During the demolition of the school, we asked the contractor if we could have any old flooring because everything was being disposed of. On a rainy November evening when I was 36 weeks’ pregnant, two tonnes of parquet was lowered into our garden by a forklift. The contractor thought we wanted it for firewood!
It was raining heavily, we immediately needed to get the old parquet inside to prevent further damage, it took us hours carrying a few bits at a time.
We let the blocks acclimatise for a few months, I had our baby in December and then the following spring we started cleaning old bitumen adhesive off. This was tedious and literally took months, we sorted through thousands of pieces and by summer I had a stack that looked good enough to lay. Although it was old, even in its sorry state the wood was far higher quality than anything modern.
I’ve never done anything like this before and I didn’t take the old tongues off the boards (this was a rookie error!) so spent a long time trying to slot them together. I wanted to do them in a herringbone style, which was probably the most challenging layout. But I measured a border, then laid out blocks of parquet from that, once I had had my central column I tentatively glued it down.
I worked column by column, doing a little bit at a time while my baby napped, before working on the edge. It was a bit like a giant jigsaw, I had to cut loads of bits to fit into tiny little gaps.
Once it was all stuck down I gently hand-sanded it with a mouse sander to take the old varnish off. I wanted to do this carefully to retain the character and patina of the floor, which means we kept old paint and ink stains, dents and dings. We didn’t want it to look new, it revealed the most beautiful honey-coloured wood. It had so much natural warmth, I sealed it with Osmo oil raw to retain the natural colour rather than stain it.
I finished the floor on December 31 2022, the very last day of the year (photo 7 probably shows my happiness and relief!). I love to think of how many little feet walked on this floor over the last 125 or so years, now my boys play on it, and I just hope it will go on to last another 100 years.