Please show us when it is done !

It's done. I just want people to beg for more pictures :) and Houzz only lets me do 4 pics at a time.

It was a tedious job - made worse by an old house with unsquare rooms and uneven floors, but strip hardwood can be cut to fit and will flex over the old (1880s) joists. Just think about the strip you are working on and not how many more there are to pound and nail. Get a good reference line and measure so the first row goes in STRAIGHT.

The tricksy part - going around the wall in Photo 2. If you have this problem, get a "slip tongue" and you can just put two groove sides together and go back towards the wall without any hassle, and match sides perfectly. I didn't know about them and had to do a lot of measuring to make it come out even.

Picture 3: The "yee-hah" moment when you realize you actually have real floors to walk on.

Picture 4: It's all over but the cleanup and a few trim pieces where I have to rip boards to fit.

Nothing is going to happen to the decor for quite a while - it's an old adobe and cosmetics are low on the list.

FLOOR DETAILS: "Character grade" 2 1/4 inch red oak prefinished from flooring.org . (would be #2 Common if unfinished) . Lengths were up to 10 foot, and the flaws and color differences are a decent match for the existing old (1895?) flooring.

I got lucky and got it on sale for about $3.50/sqft ... $2300 for enough flooring to do the Living room, dining room and (not even started yet) the master bedroom.

The "dead caucasian" colored woodwork will NOT be stripped - I'll cover it with new wood rather than hassle the lead paint removal issue. The wood under all that paint is probably local pine like the ceiling joists.

And yes, the door in Picture #3 does lean. So does the wall it's attached to. But not as much as the door in the hallway. It's typical of old adobes, because the walls have to taper and they are never straight.

Macguire - The 1992* carpet layers spread something white and crumbly on various parts of the sub-floor in an attempt to level it, instead of making sure the joists were leveled. It looked like drywall mud to me. I scraped off most of it and caulked the cracks and around the edges to minimize places where "critters" could enter.

After I scraped off the white stuff, I painted to cover the ugly and seal in the splinters until the flooring got here - you may have mistaken the grey-violet color for concrete, but it's just paint.

There is no vapor barrier - it's not recommended in adobe houses because any moisture you trap under the floor would go into the footings and up into the walls and the walls are mud brick. Wet mud brick turns back to mud and your adobe house falls down.

The woodwork all through the house is painted a very ugly, dead-looking grey-beige ... in honor of its cadaver-like qualities my SO and I named it "Dead Caucasian" (we both have medical experience and a morbid sense of humor). In a paint manufacturer’s chip book it's probably called something like "Starstruck Cappucino", but just really ugly greyish beige. Not even "greige".

===========
* I know it was 1992 because I found some bits of newspaper behind the shoe molding about president-elect Bill Clinton, and a couple of ads from late November 1992. Pink plush 1990s carpeting doesn't age well.

This is awesome!! I love that you saved your old floor and installed new to match. We have the same dilemma in our house, most is old oak, but the family room and kitchen have plywood sub-floor under the carpet and linoleum. Eventually we hope to do the same thing you did! I'm inspired!! I love it!!

Solincia - You CAN do it. It takes more patience than anything else. OK, patience and a few power tools and a compressor and a floor nailer.

It's not a match - it's clearly a different vintage where you can see them at the doorways. But then when the front of the house doesn't match the back of the house, you stop worrying about those trivial things.

I didn't "save" the old floor ... a previous owner had carpet removed from what we call "the office" and refinished it. I removed more carpet mostly because it smelled of stale milk and unwashed pets and was impossible to clean. I was hoping to find old flooring, and was disappointed to find that there was none left.

One bedroom and the hallway has the old flooring, still beat up and in need of cleaning and refinishing. We'll get to that later.

The master bedroom has a mystery floor under the 1990s carpet. I have not peeked under the carpeting because the carpeting back there is still clean and doesn't stink (I don't think they used that room much), but it's in the 1880s old-style adobe part, so it could be anything from dried mud with sleepers holding up particle board to the old oak. We don't have the time or energy to deal with it now.

Very nice indeed !!!