The original flooring is dead. Long live the floor.

We think we're nearly ready to pull the plug on all our hopes of restoring our dining room floor. We were so excited a few months ago when we realized that there was original wood flooring under the dining room's nasty carpet. But it's wasn't exactly the fairy tale that others get to live, of pulling back carpet to find a beautiful condition original floor underneath. This floor wasn't in great condition, and we think there's a good chance that we'll never get it to even decent condition, particularly relative to the money and work we'd be sinking into it, because

• it was never finished to begin with
• it's probably much lower quality wood, meant as simply a subfloor to the linoleum that was in that room when it was originally the kitchen, the 30's version of a plywood subfloor
  
• it can't be refinished until days and days and days of backbreaking scraping are done to take up the glue and felt from the old linoleum (floor refinishers won't touch it until every bit is gone)
  
• we can't tell how badly it might be stained under all that felt and glue (it was a kitchen, after all, and a kitchen that had a fire no less)
• there are a whole bunch of holes where water pipes and drain pipes and radiator pipes poked through the floor that would have to be patched
• there is about 5sq ft that is missing and just has plywood in its place.
  

Add all those together, and it just seems not worth the effort. Not cost effective, not time effective, and no guarantees that I wouldn't slit my wrists with a floor scraper before we were 1/4 of the way done.

So we haven't said our final goodbye's or made our final decision yet, but the I think we're hearing the death rattle. I'm investigating other flooring - just to help us make a decision. I've emailed someone who, a few months ago, had a good price on salvaged heart pine - just in case we decide to go that way.

If we end up giving up on the original floor, I'll be sad but I won't mourn for long. I'll be too busy arguing with V over the fact that we absolutely positively could not even consider the possibility of putting back that badly stained 1x6 construction-grade lumber that the PO's used as "baseboards" throughout the house, not on top of newly refinished floors. No way, uh-uh, fuhgedaboudit. I will sneak out in the middle of the night and bring it all to the landfill if I must, in order to keep it from going back up in that dining room. V doesn't even fully realize yet that the battle lines have been firmly drawn on this issue and I WILL emerge victorious. But she'll be ok being the conquered one once she sees how nice it will look with baseboards that actually look good.