We are slowly renovating the kitchen in our 1897 victorian. In the back half of the house, where the kitchen is it has had various flooring states over the years, and various reconfigurations. The original floors in this part of the house are not the fancy toungue and groove hardwood that is found on the rest of the first floor. The subflooring is wide planks with some gaps, and the floors themselve are planks with gaps between them (this is similar to our upstairs flooring as well). We are in the process of removing the current vinyle tile (that was glued across the whole floor!) and the layers of wood like product below that (glued and nailed). This floor was never "finished" at somepoint they laid down a product with a red gride texture on the bottom (ontop is a layer of some harded liquid and straw?) that I think was likely the original "floor covering" for the kitchen. The state of this original flooring is that there is an unbelievable amount of nails in some places, random holes in someplaces, and even fairly clear evidence of where walls used to be that have been patched in. We love old houses, we love our old house, we are not perfectionists. We do hate splinters and floors that are challenging to clean because they are not smooth :)

We will be reaching out to floor people in our area to get their thoughts on it, but we are alternating between seeing if they can lightly sand and then protect the floor and we can use it as is, showing all the beauty of the wear and changes over time. And then feeling like that may not be possible and we may have to consider something on top. Currently if I spill water on the floor it will quickly go through the gaps in the boards/subboards and pour/drip into the basement, this seem less than idea in a kitchen floor.

The floor is continuous into a room we recently expanded the kitchen into, except where they added onto the room a few feet on two sides over a crawl space. The floor there is again, planks, but currently of a different color (its under carpet at the moment, but we had it exposed a few years ago) and definately differently aged wood if not a different species.

As I said this back half of the house has seen many changes over the year from a traditional victorian kitchen with a butler closet and back stairs to the upstairs to a smaller 1920's kitchen with the backstairs removed and a bedroom with a bathroom added. Restoring it to the orginal footprint including a back stairs is not possible, and after living in the house for 9 years we have thought of many possible options before landing out our current path as imperfect as it is.

If lightly sanding it and then sealing it in someway is possible/reasonable I think that would be our preference, if we can't do that I feel a bit flummoxed on what to do for flooring. The rest of the first floor has very narrow tongue and groove that we have already been told is not reasonable to match (the historic flooring guy wouldn't recommend matching it at the narrowness that it is because there is so much waste in breakage, the closest he would go is a wider narrow board). We like authenticity in materials so would be hesitant to do any faux wood flooring, it just looks strange next to all of our natural wood. I don't love tile floors in kitchens... we just dropped things a lot :)

Thoughts and Opinions welcomed!

Bonus photos of some flooring remnant I found under a wall, this is the underside that was against the floor, we can see that pattern imprinted lightly on the floor underneath in spots.

This is the top surface.