We had just bought the house 6 months prior and waited until the 3rd floor tenant's lease ended in March. Wanting to replace the carpet with something better, we searched for flooring ideas. After talking with Bauer Brothers, a salvage place in NE, we learned it would be possible and cheap to source real hardwood flooring from a house being demolished in Saint Paul. Bauer Brothers had bought the salvage rights, so we had to pay them for the wood, but at $1/sqft it was quite the bargain. (typically materials are $3-5/sqft for hardwood flooring).
Normally, I curse the 1960s for the terrible design choices and techniques used then, but I will forever thank the carpet craze from that time. The hardwood floors at the Saint Paul house had been covered and protected in carpeting for the last half century and were in great shape! Ultimately, we brought some friends and took up about 700 sq.ft. of 1.5" oak hardwood flooring and hauled the wood in multiple trips via our station wagon.
Wood source - house being demolished in Saint Paul. Carpet had covered (and protected!) the floors for decades. You can see the remnants of carpet foam here.
Wood source - another room from the house in Saint Paul with beautiful 1.5" oak hardwood.
Step 2. Site Preparation
The third floor unit had carpet when we moved in, which we needed to remove. That was quick and easy, though the staples, especially on the stairs were annoying because they had to be removed one-by-one with rounded pliers. Once the carpet was up, we found lots of different subfloors.
The east bedroom had some sort of cork/plywood boards.
The living room was covered in linoleum.
The transition from living room to hallway was CARDBOARD.
The west bedroom was the original 1x5" subfloor.
We levered and scraped, heaved and hoed to remove all of the layers down to the 1x5" subfloor. We then patched a few areas and cleaned it up before moving on to luan and rosin paper.