Looked at an 1890s house install and the tack strips were original

Went to measure a place in Charlottesville last Tuesday and pulled up some old carpet in a closet. The tack strips were still the old wooden ones with hand driven nails, not a single strip replaced since the place was built. Crazy to think we tear out and redo stuff every 10 years but that stuff held for over a century. Any of yall ever run into original wood strips that were still in good shape?

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sage_dixon22d ago

That's wild, I found a set of those in a place down in Richmond a couple years back, same deal, still solid. Only thing though, people always call them tack strips but they're actually called tackless strips. The old ones were usually pine or fir, and they'd nail them straight into the subfloor with cut nails that had that little wedge shape. The reason they lasted so long is the wood was old growth, way denser than the plantation pine crap we get now. Modern strips use those little wire pins and they bend or pull out way easier, so seeing that old stuff still biting is a real testament to how things were built back then.