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Warning: my contractor said 'you can't save a 1920s porch floor with sanding,' and he was right about the boards but wrong about everything else
Bought a 1921 bungalow near Scranton for $38,000 two winters back. The porch floor was painted seven times, last coat a thick gray latex that was peeling in sheets. My first plan was to rent a drum sander and take it all down to bare wood. The contractor I had look at the roof glanced at the porch and said flat out 'you can't save that with sanding, tear it out and pour concrete.' I almost listened. Instead I took a paint scraper to one board and found heart pine under all of it, tight grain, barely any rot except two boards near the steps. What he was right about was the sanding, the drum sander would have chewed those soft old boards to nothing in a minute. What I did instead was scrape by hand, then hit it with a chemical stripper, then a random orbit at low speed with 120 grit, and it took me about six weekends. Total cost was around $340 in stripper and sandpaper, plus $60 for two replacement boards I pulled from a salvage yard in Wilkes-Barre. So my pushback is this, 'you can't save it' usually means 'I don't want to spend the time.' Has anybody here actually had a pro talk them out of saving original wood, and were they right?
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