Ha, I saw this earlier and came back to write pretty much what Hollysprings said. So, yeah--that. We have doug fir subfloors too, but they were definitely not designed for prime time (original blueprints called for cement tile--sadly long gone!) It was a really common subfloor wood in the West in the early 20th century because it was so inexpensive. A couple of other thoughts: - Fir is beautiful (many of our neighbors have refinished their fir floors) but it is very soft. One neighbor has a large dog and another has a young child; both floors have taken a beating (the dog floor in particular). That's the primary reason we covered ours back up. Better to keep it safe for someone who might want it in the future! I agree that I don't think it would be easy/possible to get it to tan; fir tends towards orange/red. You can stain it but it looks strange (I think, at least--our new-old fir door has a light tan stain of some sort that is supposedly helping to even the grain where there was some variation, but I think just makes it look yellow on top of the reddish fir tones...bleh). - If you like linoleum, you might look at Marmoleum Click; this is what we chose specifically because it doesn't get glued down, so someone could take it up in the future and refinish the fir. Don't know how their colors compare to Armstrong's, though. We do have another neighbor who laid sheet Marmoleum on the fir, so it can be done but obviously not if you want to preserve the floor for refinishing later. If it's already painted, though, it may not be in great shape underneath. (Ours is a mess and would require some board replacement to refinish; possible but $$. The original builders took no particular care in nail placement or matching grain since it wasn't intended to be used as a finished floor.)

I would say that *most of the stuff has to have a certain amount of quality to it, yes. I am not sure the architecture has to be great: a couple of the examples look like NYC apartments that have a decent proportion to the rooms but not a lot of detailing. I think, though, that the room itself has to be a container. I don't see this in an open plan surburban house where rooms spill into other rooms and upper floors look down on lowers. I think the room itself has to be the first "box" into which the contents go. I think the furniture that the collections are displayed upon are important for their surface. If you notice, most of these collections are not lined up in curio cabinets or shallow book cases. There is an intimacy with the collection in that it is right there. I *don't think that everything needs to be high quality or have provenance: Among my mother's collection of artisan signed and made, Tiffany, and "collectible" paperweights are a couple real cheapies, including one that my sister bought at GC Murphy when she was a teenager. For a while there was a plate displayed next to her ginger jars. I won that at the carnival in the ring toss. (the colors looked good together). Among the stuff that I sometimes display I have a tape measure with a boy"s picture on it, a plastic figurine of a girl with a ski pole, a big bisque doll's leg that I found on the sidewalk, a headless doll also from sidewalk. A Howdie Doodie nightlight with a hole burnt through it, a Darth Vader carrying case, deers hooves made into hooks, obviously plastic "coral" and various and sundry other pieces of real junk. None of these things get the place of honor like the candlestick collection or the bronze pieces or the Keanes, but they sometimes end up on bookshelves or on piles of piles of books where they create dialogs (or something) with each other.

I got some scary gunk off of my fir subfloor by using the Silent Paint Remover, it's an infrared heater. You hold it over the surface for a number of seconds, and it softens & bubbles up the layer enough to get a nice sharp scraper underneath it to scrape it up. Tedious, but it worked very well without damaging the floor or creating any low spots or dips. I sanded the fir for refinishing afterwards. The SPR is very pricy at $390, but I was able to resell mine almost at cost -- look on eBay etc for a used one perhaps? And in all honesty, if you have an infrared space heater, I bet it would work just as well. Just exercise caution, as always! Here is a link that might be useful: Silent Paint Remover

"Pal, I'm very intrigued by this and by an earlier comment you made distinguishing between 'tacky' and 'intentionally vulgar'. As a Germanic type, I'm fairly clear on what Kitsch is (!), but vulgar/tacky is a finer and more difficult one for me to parse. Where would one start in making that conceptual differentiation, in your view?" I think 'tacky' is UNintentional, as in trying to decorate a room that looks really "classy" but fails. I also know someone who has a very rigid palette and "theme" for each room and while they really aren't quite tacky, they aren't particularly elegant either. There is obsessive attention to perfect matching of colors, and, for example, if the starting point is a rug, Only a color that is in the rug can appear in the room, and if there is only a Little bit of a color in the rug only a Little of that color can reappear. Pillows and pictures and accessories and knickknacks get auditioned and if they don't match something exactly they get returned. If the theme in the dining room is "Wine" even the pictures on the walls have to have something to do with wine or grapes or vineyards. It's all very stiff and "formal" even though she would say her style is casual. There is nothing really wrong or bad about the way the rooms look, but the effect is a little dead rather than comfortable. In contrast the intentionally over the top aspects of this apartment are the ones that Reject the initial formality that is the foundation of each room: "Like Blue Willow china? Let's see if we can cram 18 plates onto the backsplash" "Bird cage dangling down apropos of nothing else in the kitchen? Sure, why not?" "Pale blue and pink bedroom grounded in black? Lets put a brown-black, gold and avocado pillow on a prominent chair. It clashes with everything. That'll show em we're casual." "TV? Let's go to extremes to hide it and then tell everyone where it is." They didn't stop when they knew it was enough. They did things like set up a rigid formality with the Japanese screen on the end wall and then put a lopsided furniture arrangement with the sofa to one side underneath. They intentionally used colors that didn't quite match, and intentionally threw in some things that clashed. Tacky would never do this, tacky would have to make sure it all matched, all followed the rules, and it all wasn't too much.