Plank Position

ED executive editor Ingrid Abramovitch, left, in her Brooklyn living room. Her 130-year-old yellow-pine floors were refinished using ecofriendly water-based products from Bona (us.bona.com). Abramovitch wrote a guide to renovating antique city homes, Restoring a House in the City (Artisan).

PICKLED, OILED, HARD-CONTOURED, OR SCRAPED. Pale as the planking in a Gustavian ballroom or as intricate as the parquet in St. Petersburg’s Pavlovsk Palace. Whatever your fancy, wood floor options are endless these days—a fact that became abundantly clear when I recently restored the 130-plus-year-old surfaces in my Brooklyn home. The yellow-pine flooring was one of the original details that seduced me into buying my family’s duplex in an Italianate brownstone in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood, just a few blocks from where Moonstruck was filmed. Maybe, like Cher urges Nicolas Cage in the film, I should have just snapped out of it: The floors had what some might call patina and others would dub problems (tons of holes and gaps between boards). But I’m glad I didn’t— reclaimed-wood floors have since become a luxury product. The floors were sanded and sealed with a shiny oil-based polyurethane (standard procedure in 2001), a messy process that left chemical odors lingering for a week.