Just a general comment that, if you need to patch the floors, this sort of house and situation is one where obviously patched /repaired/ altered floors work pretty well. Especially if the new is somewhat distressed to blend with the old.

Marmoleum would be a great choice as a backup plan. It's old home sympathetic and more moisture resistant because it doesn't have an HDF core, and less prone to fading.

What's the arched formal mouse door to the left there in the pic?

Was just going to ask what Sophie did. Mouse house? ;)

Electric and plumbing. While everyhthing is open that is the time to make changes especially if the walls are open to the top of the first floor and your electricity comes in on the first floor and goes up. You may need to fix old wiring and you may want to pull romex/put extra outlets in the rooms above... you may need a new electric panel to do that. Similarly there may be second floor plumbing issues that would also be good to deal with when open. Hopefully all such changes will be "want" not "must" changes! It is so much more fun to decide on a floor (which you will see) than to need a rewire (which you won't).

The biggest surprise in our 180 year old house was the ceiling in the oldest section of the kitchen. Our house had been added to in the 1950s but when they pulled that section off to extend the beams into our newly planned addition the adjoining ancient plaster just crumbled and revealed deteriorating beams. He was surprised it hadn't fallen down on its own. It was a lot of $ to fix and a week of waiting for town inspector to approve holding up all work. We knew we had electrical issues so that was expensive too but not a surprise.

Palimpsest - agree 100%. I'm absolutely fine with patching & mismatched stuff - goes perfectly with my house & my aesthetic.

Sophie - I'll look into Marmoleum. Not something I know about, thank you. The mouse door is for the cats to get to their litter boxes in the basement. I hired a handyman to install it - felt a bit bad about cutting a hole into an old (probably original) door, but it was the best option.

Practigal - I will be getting a new panel. Luckily the electricity in this house has been very good - lots of outlets. The outside outlets, though, don't work & will be replaced. I did consider putting a ceiling fan in the LR, but am thinking I won't do it after all.

brdrl - that's the kind of stuff I'm afraid of!

We did cork in our last two kitchens and loved it. Would definitely be doing it again except this house has original (1926) hardwoods throughout so we are keeping them--had to have some added for the annexed former laundry room and they blended them perfectly. (Dh briefly tried to talk me into taking out the hardwoods and putting in cork anyway because we both loved the cork so much.). I did put marmoleum in our master bathroom. I like it too.

Our "surprise" for this renovation was dry rot in the joists and studs in the hall bathroom. We knew there was some in the kitchen, but it turned out there was way more in the bathroom. Good news was that it was only an extra $2000 and two days to fix and we found it via renovation rather than via the house falling down.

I love the "mouse" door for the cats. So charming. Something Snow White would have.

Marmoleum is simply the new name for good, old linoleum. A wonderful flooring surface. We've revealed the original linoleum in our 1949 home and we love it. I'm probably doing pure cork glue-down in my living/dining rooms as that is the only room without the linoleum in it. The original floors are plywood sub-floors so those rooms were probably originally carpeted. So, obviously, I love cork, too. I would love to see you use your original pine floors, even if you have patches but will also throw out this idea - in the past, they used to make linoleum area rugs for people who wanted some protection over their wood floors. If there is a lot of patching needed in the center of your room and you decide to cover it up, I think it would be cool to just have it laid in the center to mimic that area rug look. You could even design a rug look with an edging.

If you do cork, you might want to investigate into pure cork squares (glue down) vs. the floating floor cork. The floating kind will think enough where you'll have an obvious change of floor level which would, I think, be a problem in your small space. Unless you have them lower your sub-floor (expensive!). The glue-down squares are thin enough where the level change would be minimal and barely noticeable. Plus, the glue down will handle a spill left unattended better than the floating kind if the spill gets down into the HDF core.

I have nothing to add about unknowns. In an old house, you just have to hold your breath and be prepared for anything. Hope things go smoothly without any bad surprises!

We had the floating cork flooring in both of our previous kitchens. Our subfloor was not lowered. There was no noticeable change in height between the cork and the adjacent wood flooring. Ymmv.

Love, love the cat door. SO cute!

crl_ good to hear you like cork and like marmoleum! A local friend of mine had her kitchen floor done with some kind of covering (maybe marmoleum!) that mimics cork in look (and even texture) and she loves it. Good point about it being good to find those structural surprised before they make the house fall down, especially when not devastatingly expensive!

Funkycamper - yea, the mouse door is pretty perfect. When I first moved in, I'd just have to leave the basement door open a crack, which is kind of a pain. That, and helpful guests would always close the door for me... I ended up stripping the dozen or so layers of pain on the door eventually, and then stained the whole thing, mouse door and all, so it almost looks original to the door. Speaking of subfloors... here's my floor, standing in the basement looking up:

I know I'll need patching around the existing sink, which will be right where the back door is, which I think is a fine place to have a patch - I can cover it with a door mat and/or it can look like an (almost?) intentional change.

Really, crl_? Were they new builds? Every time we've remodeled and put in laminate flooring, there has been obvious differential between floor heights requiring a.....oh, crap, senior moment, that strip you put between floors....with noticeable step up/down. Are we doing something wrong?

Carrie, have you thought about at least putting insulation under your floor. Doesn't it get cold in Philadelphia?

Funkycamper -it does get cold in Philadelphia, but the basement generally stays the same temperature as the rest of the house in winter (and is nice and cool in the summer - the cats hang out down there some when it's hot.) I don't think there are any actual heat vents down there, but the furnace is there. Don't know why it's not cold in winter down there, but it's not.

I'll bet your floors are fine. That old growth is very tough. People have been fashion conscious for 200 years at least.

Joseph - I sure hope the floors are fine. The one area where I'd definitely need a floor-width fix is at the current sink, at the back of the house. I don't know how long, but possible as long as 44", there's the heat duct obscuring some of the floor in the basement. I think the big question has been whether the tile was glued directly onto the old wood floor, or if there was plywood (or something) laid onto the floor first, and then tiled on top of the plywood. This is a photo of the pipes going up to the sink, and the place where the old floor needs repair, going into the heat duct.

Speaking of floating, what does that mean? How can a floor be floating?

We had two big surprises in our remodel. The first one was strange and almost funny. There was an entire other plumbing setup hidden behind one of the corner cabinets. Just left in place, unused. The drain pipe wasn't even sealed. The previous kitchen remodeler actually cut the back of the corner cabinet to fit over it. I don't know why.

The other surprise was that on two of our walls, the studs and sill plate had completely rotted away due to old water and termite damage. That one was less funny and led to conversations like, "So what's holding up that window?" ... "I don't know. Memory?" There was a two week delay while we found someone to fix the damage (this was a DIY remodel but I don't do structural) and a lot of sleepless nights. But in the end, I guess I'm glad we found it and fixed it before anything bad happened because of it.

The best advice I can give is try not to lose your sense of humor!

It just means the flooring is laid on top of the current floor or sub-floor without needing to glue or nail in place. The molding around the edge is what secures it. I think floating floors are always the click together kind.

Some of the surprises are fun because they reveal the story of your house. We gutted our little house and were able to see how it evolved from a tiny 1880s cabin through several janky additions and apparently a fire (the burnt old roof was still in place in the attic) to the last renovation in 1947. Peeling back layers of linoleum, finding filled in doorways and windows and the evolution of materials was fun.

Now, arriving to the house after they removed the floor sleepers was not fun because each of those additions had a different level of floor with variations up to around 5 inches resulting in removing all the floors and leveling the joists and putting down 1200 square feet of new subfloor. Yikes. But now we have a single, continuous, level floor :-)

Kristensgc - good caution. Depending on how long it goes on... well, we'll see how well I do on that.

Benjesbride - I'm kinda hoping I find horse hair insulation in the walls!

funkycamper, not new builds. The first house was built in 1939 the second in 1954. Both had flooring on top of the subfloor. So that old flooring was removed and the laminate laid directly on the subfloor. If there was any difference in height, it was so tiny I never noticed it. (The wood hall to tile bathroom transition in our ongoing reno is a different story.)

We had some known-unknowns about the state of the subfloor and wiring but that all worked out ok.

There were a couple surprises but nothing that ended up being a big problem. We tore out a 6' section of non load-bearing wall to open up the pantry/laundry closet to the kitchen. When we started pulling off the door jam we were shocked to find that the studs behind it looked like swiss cheese. Termites had eaten their way through most of the framing on that wall (They didn't like the header on the door frame for some reason). There had been a termite infestation maybe 20 years ago and you can see where damage was repaired in the attic but there was no visible signs that this wall had a problem either from the attic or the crawl space.

The good news:

-not load bearing (but I think the door jambs were helping hold up the header ;) )

-the termites didn't touch the adjacent exterior wall even though they trashed the stud that butted up to it.

- the only thing they damaged that we weren't tearing out was the bottom of the ceiling joist above the top plate, and we'd already sistered it for other reasons. Had to patch maybe one subfloor board.

So it was actually completely fine, just really really horrifying when we started opening up the wall.

Also had a few issues with knowing walls were out of square, but underestimating how much they were off until after tearing everything out. I would suggest having them remeasure after demo to make sure your cabinets are really going to fit.

My biggest "unknown, unknowns" were my GC did not know as much as I assumed he would and too often made choices based on cost/code vs quailty/science.

What I would do differently is (1) read everything you can on GW [too bad there is not a book of all the excellent advice you will find here], (2) whenever asked for a decision reply, "what are the alternatives?" and (3) don't give in just to get it done (wish I insisted on where the fridge went).

Oh, OK, that makes sense, crl_. We didn't remove the flooring in the other houses we did. Wood flooring in decent shape but needed refinishing and these are rentals so it was quicker, easier and cheaper to just cover them up.

However, in our current house, we would have to actually remove and lower the sub-floor to not have vastly different heights. The original linoleum, which we exposed and like and want to keep for our floor, is barely 1/8" higher than the exposed sub-floor in the other areas that don't have linoleum. I think those areas were originally carpeted so they wouldn't have worried about that.

When we remodeled the kitchen in the 100+ year old condo unit that we owned we needed to bring it up to code. The kitchen had only 2 electric outlets in it. When the electricians attempted to run wiring to one wall of the kitchen we were surprised to find out that that wall was concrete block covered with plaster. The electricians had to make channel cut in the blocks to run the wires through. Talk about dust!

With all the holes that had to be made in all the walls, the contractor decided to cover the walls with 1/4 inch dry wall rather than trying to blend in all the patching. It turned out great but no one told the cabinet guy that behind that nice new drywall lurked a concrete block wall. I was there the day he was installing the cabinets by himself and he couldn't figure out why he his electric drill/screwdriver was having trouble. I suddenly remembered about the block wall. Time for a different drill bit!

Also we had refinished all the hardwood floors in the place before we did the kitchen, if only we had known that beneath several layers of linoleum in the kitchen were the same great maple floors that were in the rest of the place. We felt bad about covering them up with some tile-look laminate but at that point it was too late to go through the floor refinishing process again..

I bet that you will find the pine flooring under your kitchen floor layers. I am sure that a good floor refinisher will get them to match the other floors even with any patching that might be needed.

Good luck. Can't wait to see your new space.

Awesome mouse door! Keep us posted. I love the possibilities of this house. Sorry I do not have a lot to add. We tried to buy a 1903 house that still had a carriage entryway, but the reno costs would not have supported the cost of the house and loan (the entire neighborhood would have needed to be rebuilt). Shame....had a huge basement AND a root cellar, which is unheard of down here.

GL!

Russ