I like to visit open homes with buddies who’re searching to buy, or for myself, to satisfy my curiosity about places in my community that I’ve constantly wanted to see. And hiya, you never realize…..To me, the excellent old houses are the ones that no one has touched in years. The floors are included in the wall-to-wall carpeting of dubious antiquity or layers upon layers of linoleum.
The second fact arises when you may clutch the end of the carpet or raise the linoleum, and there they’re, blanketed for umpteen years from wear and tear and the foibles of horrific decor: parquet flooring! Even better is going to a corner and catching sight of an ornate border, ringing the room, the distinctive colored woods forming traces and patterns, artistry in timber. Love it! However, on occasion, you can pull up the carpet, and there is nothing special there.
A residence with ornate woodwork, marble fireplaces, the works, and there you go, an eh floor. What passed off? Were the original proprietors cheap? Did a person tear out the flooring? Why do some houses have such terrific, authentic flooring, and others don’t? When did parquet grow to be famous, and what did homeowners use in our Brooklyn homes earlier than that?
Except for a handful of Colonial-era homes, most of the oldest brownstones and body homes in our oldest neighborhoods are from the 1830s to the mid-1850s. In those earliest homes, the authentic floors were softwood plank floors, like pine, laid in random widths. Most of the time, the floor was either painted or included. The unique finish changed into never a glowing waxed or varnished finish. To clean this flooring, they were normally scrubbed with sand and a cord brush or bleached with lye.
Painted floors had often been stenciled with border or rug styles. Coverings ranged from woven matting, really much like our current-day rugs, to heavy canvas painted floorcloths, to a protective covering called drugget, or carpet. Drugget changed into a reasonably-priced woolen or cotton/flax, undeniably woven fabric, sewn together to the preferred width.
Depending upon one’s finances, drugget often became used to cover a better carpet, protect it, and was also popular under the carpet to provide an attractive border where the carpeting stopped. Matting, a lot of it imported from India and China, also turned into the carpet padding and additional protection in nicely traveled areas, including near stairs and entrances.
