. I'll ditto that there's likely lots that can be done that don't involve the furnace replacement . . though that should still stay on the radar screen. Being an older place it is likely pretty loose . . infiltration that is . . drafts around windows, sill, all over the place . ..and may not have any insulation in the walls etc. Blown cellulose could help a lot if that's the case; installed from outside via holes drilled. You need to be careful about insulating the attic area . . . if you do so, you must allow for ventilation under the roof sheathing / boards . .. if not; you will almost surely guarantee yourself ice dammming and the attendant damage. I think a slick way to help yourself out would be to use rigid foam insulation; spaced AWAY from the underside of the sheathing by about 2". Cut to width between rafters; it can be "squish" fit in there and will stay put on it's own. The good rigid foams are ~ R-7 per inch if I remember correctly. Additional insulation in your ceiling would help too no matter what; and it's relatively easy to do. By the way; I'm curious your "UGH" when you mentioned cellulose . . it's dusty to deal with; but it's excellent insulation and VERY environmentally friendly . . I used nothing BUT that in my new construction. It WILL settle after installation; but remember that the R-value is base upon SETTLED density. And you don't "pack" it in . . . let it settle. Usually you get free use of a blowing machine when you buy so many bags . . . a bit messy but definately a do it yourself thing. I've seen a lot of older houses built with nothing BUT flooring on the joists; leaving LOTS of places for air infiltration from the basement. Again; rigid foam can be fit between the joists and make your floors a warmer by limiting losses DOWN through them, as well as limiting direct heat transfer as well. Window and door weatherstripping can be of great help too; even the best modern windows are pretty much R-crap compared to practically ANY wall; but a direct air leak can lose a lot through a winter . . . . and a lot of little gaps adds up to the equivalent of leaving a window open year 'round . . . Good luck . . . Bob

OK, why would replacing the subfloor help? That is what I called the GC to see about doing and he said it would not help. I can not do that myself but did call a contractor to inquire. Apparently yes I have a high spot running the length of the house along the steel beam, which has not settled like the floor to one side (the livingroom). The floor to the other side does not appear to be sagging as much, but that is the side that had the fire and I believe the joists were probably replaced. The floor is NOT "perfectly" level beyond that, there appear to be some small dips that are very slight. Using a 4 foot level, not a 6 since I don't have one, I just placed it in about 3 other places and found no noticeable areas where the floor is not flat. Adding another layer of 1/4 in plywood would be fine, but there is no way to make that a smooth transition that I can think of since the new piece would create an even more abrupt change in level. Taking out the subloor along the beam might help but then it would be less than 1/2". It is 5/8" now, and if I reduced that by 1/4 inch, that would only leave 3/8", not enough to nail hardwood to, I don't believe. I would really rather not take up the first 3 rows that are face nailed, if at all possible. I have those nailed in straight to within 1/8" over a 16 1/2 foot run, including past a 6' opening, and that was a bit of a PIA to get to that point. I didn't know you could nail hardwood to leveling compound? My problem with filling the "dip" is that it is more of a permanent drop in the level of the floor beyond that point and I would have to increase it across most of the entire floor. There is actually a small "ramp" going up the hall past the bathroom on the opposite side of the steel beam, but that is also where a neighbor said the fire was. I believe the subfloor and probably even the joists were replaced after the fire on that side of the steel beam in 1994, but the joists and probably the subfloor on the livingroom side are original and date to 1960. I don't know what a fire or the process of putting out a fire can do to steel beams and joists. The house was fully inspected when I purchased it 10 yrs ago, and I still have the 20 page report. The structure was determined to be very sound. I have seen no evidence of movement in the house in the last 10 years, no big cracks or even increasing numbers of small cracks, in ceilings or walls, and what I can see of foundation looks OK. Windows open and close fine, etc. I guess if the contractor I called doesn't feel it will help, I am a little uncertain about where to go from there. I am sure I can find someone who would do what I ask, but are you sure it will help? Why won't the new sub floor just assume the same position over a short period of time? Here is a photo of the layout with the flooring direction. The flooring is being laid perpendicular to the joints, parallel to the steel beam. I am trying to install hardwood through the livingroom and kitchen and started along the wall that divides the two. I plan to reverse the boards using a spline to install the kitchen side. At this point, I plant to start the kitchen tomorrow and put this aside until I can figure out the correct thing to do. When the kitchen floor is in, I can at least proceed with my remodel and have the new kitchen installed. In the meantime, I will need to figure this out and thank you all for your help so far and hope you can help me resolve this. Sue

I realized after I posted that I just added more issues to think about; but you are correct there are tons of info and misinfo out there about floors in general. Nail polish remover is acetone, and what you removed was probably old-fashioned varnish which I think is soluble in acetone. I'm not sure acetone dissolves shellac - alcohol does that. It's not un common to have multiple different types of old finishes, for various reasons, (You might try some denatured alcohol, or vodka. I use grain alcohol which is the nuts, though sometimes hard to obtain because of laws trying to prevent people from misusing it. I actually have to leave NY and buy mine in VT, by preorder from a State source.) The cracks you see in August (and still now) are likely the narrow ones! Wait until late March rolls around after a full winter of heating. I can lose Bic pens in some of mine. That's when they are easiest to clean out, though. I wouldn't try anything other than emergency washing until the cracks are clean as there is no point moistening that junk in there. It's important that at the end of the season that the gaps are clean as they begin to swell back up. Dirt and debris trapped in the cracks as they close can compress the edges of the floor board, causing increasing gaps the next season. Of course old houses weren't built when there were effective vacuum cleaners so there's a lot of debris down there. As to washing: Murphy's has long been a standby, but has also acquired some (perhaps innaccurate) reputation as being hard to fully remove from floors prior to using poly urethane finishes. I will say this: about a decade ago I was visiting Montpelier, Pres. James Madison's plantation, (he was comtemporary pal of Thos. Jefferson) in VA. I happened to be visiting in the off season and got to wander around a bit more than most visitors. I climbed a staircase and encountered the curatorial staff working on an as-yet-unopened-to-the-public room. They were busily at work washing the floor of the room, with you guessed it: Murphy's and water. So if it's good enough for such an important and professionally cared-for house, it's probably good enough for mine. Otherwise I use Organic Linseed Oil Soap - imported from Sweden, doncha know. I got it from the site that sells the Silent Paint Remover. I find it's an excellent cleaner, smells nice and wasn't particularly expensive since I only use a little at a time. In olden days the floors were sometimes washed with lye, leached out of wood ashes, so I imagine a little Murphy's or Method won't hurt. Floors were also strewn with sand which was then swept up. (That's why you'll likely encounter sand in the cracks even if you're far from the beach.) Don't try washing unless you have a huge pile of rags on had to handdry the floor off at once. Yes, hand sanding or scraping is a one-room-at-a-time type project. More so than renting a drum sander. The only catch is how to meld the meeting point of applied finishes at the threshold when the adjacent rooms are not done all at once, if you don't have a raised threshold. One of the beauties of shellac is that it can be patched up or touched up, or joined together seamlessly anywhere, even in the middle of board in the middle of a room. It's not without its detractions however, the primary one being that it is not bulletproof the way modern poly is. OTOH, should trouble ensue you just clean the surface where the problem is of any wax and dirt and get out a brush and touch it up. It redissolves the old shellac, mixing it with the newly applied stuff and dries so the patch is invisible. Can't say that about any poly finish. You can get it completely off with rags and alcohol and start the whole thing anew if you want. The fix-ability and the reverse-ability have much to recommend it. It is also pretty easily DIY-ish, and cheap. You can search for more info using Google and here on thsi site. But be forewarned there is a LOT of anti-shellac prejudice out there by floor pros, and some people who are just repeating what someone else said. There are also some excellent reports by people who took the chance on it and are very happy. It is relatively slower to apply and more hands and kness sort of work. Don't try it unless you are in a warm-ish, but mostly unhumid time of year. You need to ventilate the room. It is not the worst stuff for breathing, but not benign either. Shellac itself (though not the carrier) is an organic product made from exudations of a beetle in India. I'm imagining you might be interested in seeing what can be learned from your floors. Here are two things to look for (get down on your knees with a good flashlight.) Look for little rows of holes running along the floor. The holes will probably close be together but the rows separated by about 21-27 inches apart. This is evidence of an early floor covering called ingrain carpet held down by tacks. Another thing to look for is evidence how the floor was finished originally (and to know if it has ever been sanded by modern methods). Drum and orbital sanders didn't exist, even sand paper as we know it didn't, so very sharp broadknives were used to scrape the floor flat and ready for finishing. If you hold a light at a raking angle in a place where the wouldn't have been much foot traffic, you may be able to see shallow 1/16th to 3/16 ths inch wide grooves on the surface. This are the still-remaining toolmarks of the original floor's finishing, you are looking at the hand-made work of the floor installer. If you can see the undersides of the boads, say y looking up at the first floor from the cellar, you may be able to see the saw pattern, which can tell you if it was made from logs using a hand-powered pit saw, circular saw, etc. This helps nail down the age of the building because of technology of locally available materials is often known pretty accurately. Have you sorted out which floors are the splintery-est? I have some fir and it has narrow, sharp, fierce splinters. The flat-sawn wide-board pine pretty mellow. Quarter-sawn oak strip is rarely that way. It's not uncommon to find many types of wood in a single house. It's worth learning the correct indentifications of both species and board type (flat, quarter, radial, T&G, butted, lapped, etc.) as sometimes choices of floor finishing techniques are limited by type of wood. Oh, I forgot to add: the reason I use old credit cards (and similar plastic things) to clean out cracks is that the edges and rounded corners are less damaging to the board sides within the groove than metal implements. Plus all the credit cards that are expired get another round of use if recycled into my floor tool box. Card companies used to send out plastic versions of fake ones they use to try and get you to apply for them. I was in plastic tool heaven, but, alas now the facsimiles are just cardboard. Another solvent to try is Soygel. It is particularly, though slowly, useful on floors. Leave it covered with plastic wrap for days, if necessary. Let time do the work, rather scraping it yourself. It also cleans up nicely which is something you can't say about most chemical strippers. All these solvents and the rags used to apply and clean off have the potential for spontaneous combustion. Either air them out on a line for days or dispose of them in a metal, closed container filled with water, and kept outside away from the house. HTH(elps) more than just adding to the overload. L. Here is a link that might be useful: source of Excellent Technical on Info on Care of Old Buildings (NPS Preserv. Briefs)

Redroze, I'm just getting back online and seeing your questions, so I'll try to answer what I can. My new floor in the LR/DR was not pre-finished, it was all site-finished. I did put a pre-finished floor down in my office (no pics, sorry) because I work from home and didn't have time to be without my office for the week it would have taken to have floor sanded etc. The pre-finished does have a different feel to it than the site-finished. I wouldn't say it's grooved, just a more defined difference in between the individual planks. The office doesn't adjoin any other room, except the tiled hallway, so I didn't worry so much about the wood being different there. I see from your pictures what you mean about running the planks the same way and wanting to be sure things don't look odd. One idea might be to take up some of your FR planks, like the first 12 or so, and then put them back down interwoven with the new planks. That way there's not a clear line in between the 2 rooms, but rather a more gradual blending. Here's another couple of pictures, this time of my family room. The first one is a before shot of the hardwood floor + a rug-like carpet. The floor created a frame around the carpet. I had the carpet taken up and new hardwood put in where the carpet originally was, then everything sanded and refinished. You absolutely can't tell where the old wood was vs where the new started. In this case, the new is random width because it opens directly to the kitchen (as opposed to the LR/DR which is all the same width). So, one house, all new site-finished floors in the LR & DR, all new pre-finished floor in the office, original/refinished in the kitchen, and half&half refinished + original in the family room. Boy did we have dust! Hope this helps! New: