Soft wood

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Just being a coniferous (cone bearing) species does not have all that much to do with a wood's hardness. Some soft wood is harder than some hardwood and a lot of the soft wood will harden with age.

What you really want to figure out is how old the wood is, is it flooring or a subfloor, and it's condition. The paint can be a bit of the history of an old house--say more than 150 years or so old--or a decorating gimmick designed to make the room look older or just a cheap way to cover the floor until someone could afford to do it better. The age will give you some direction on this.

The next thing is to check the condition. Pry off some of the base molding or remove a heating or air return vent so you can get some kind of a look at what the wood and what's under it. If you see a subfloor, go into the basement and see what it looks like from there. A lot of really old houses did not have subfloors and the inevitable gaps between boards can cause some real problems with heating, cooling and dirt in today's more controlled environments. If the floor you are seeing is really the subfloor, put something over it like flooring or carpeting.

If the pine is the floor, are the edges tongue and grooved? Is there enough wood (1/8") or so to allow refinishing. You lose wood when you refinish and if you will be at or near the tongue and groove joint thickness after refinishing, you will continue to have problems with splitting anlong the joint lines as the floor moves. If they will be little wood left, flooring or carpet will again be your best option.

If it's not tongue and grooved, and there is a lot of wood there for refinishing, you may have a good candidate for refinishing. If you don't have tongue and groove joints, you may tear up a lot of sander belts or sandpaper. No t&g joints means that the wood is almost certainly face nailed and sanding will expose some of those nails, which will tear the sandpaper. You may be able to live with this, and you will have an easier time of it with an orbital sander like you should be able to rent at your home center, rather than a drum sander.

Something else to be aware of is that wood moves with changes in humidity. You can't see it, but if you leave your house open in the summer, there is more actual humidity in the air which will go into the wood and cause it to grow across it's width particularly. When winter heating season comes, the air itself can't hold as much water so the water leaves the wood for the drier air and the wood decreases in size. This causes gaps between boards in a floor. Some people try to fill the gaps in the winter with something like a wood filler that gets real hard. The next summer, the wood expands and crushes the wood fibers. The next winter, the gaps are back and they continue to get worse as the filler starts to crumble away also. This sequence will happen and, unless you have and can maintain almost museum quality air controls, it will be a problem. The t&g joint was designed to minimize this effect and you will want to consider this as you make your decisions.

Henry in MI