A Victorian-Era House Turns Out to Be a Diamond in the Rough

At the time, Matt was working on a job renovating a monastery, and he brought home salvaged jewels, including a 10-foot-long, two-basin, stainless-steel pot-washing sink (with undercounter storage) and herringbone parquet wood flooring, both of which we put in my favorite room of the house: the kitchen. The sink provides almost half of the room's 20 linear feet of counter space.

My favorite project was getting gray and dusty as I sanded away—by hand—decades of built-up filth from each of the 4-by-12-inch pieces of oak parquet flooring. I must have sat for 300 hours, doing six pieces an hour.