I think I 'm in love with these floors

Here is the way the original floor looked, in 1998...well, not exactly. This floor has been swept and scrubbed, while other work was being done. When guys are standing around waiting, they spend a lot of time sweeping, just in case anyone wants to come up a look. The put their lunch detris in the trash and stuff, so the worksite looks clean and safe.

The first time I saw it, it was under about 40 years of dirt, pigeon and bat poop.
We think that originally, since this was a really high class hotel, it was linoleum (which, in1890 was really progressive). The second photo is with the lino scraped off. At this point, around 2004, we weren;t sure what the next step was going to be. We had been looking for carpet, but I wasn't sold on the patterned Victorian hotel look and 3,000 square feet of carpet is a LOT of carpet.
Then we got a salvage job out in Stratford and got all of that old schoolroom floor. Sort of fitting, since I had taught school for so long. One thing, we wanted it to be sort of light, because the woodwork was going to be dark but with flooring so old, with so many years of wax rubbed inot the grain, we neighther one of us had any clue what it would really look like...other than interesting!
So here it is. The first photo is the patterns being laid down
And the second photos is the pattern finished but not sanded down yet. We did that during Christmas 2005. With all of the old flooring, it wasn't perfectly level and there were some squeaks as well, not that I mind a squeaky floor. Let's people know where people are.
The third photo is of the floor after it had been sanded multiple times


This photo doesn't do it justice, since you can't see how pretty is is coming out. The old wax and stain by this time has been planed and sanded out, but the tread marks where 150 years of feet walking around in the classroom have not been eradicated. And I don't want them to be. I want the footsteps to be visable. Because once it's all polyureathaned with a satin finish, this is what you have...
Gorgeous old wood floors in the library with gorgeous old windows flinging the afternoon light across the room. The wood positively gleams like melted honey dripped out of the light and it is so pretty! Exactly the way I see it in my head. (Okay, better than that...I tend to see whatever picture in the last home dec magazine I just saw and the really pricy mansions types don't sell here in Kings County.)