another episode of "what the white carpet covers"

[Neal Clayton]

last two coats are going on my bedroom floor today, sure will be nice to stop sleeping on the guest bed in a couple/three weeks after the finish is cured ...and the trim is up...and the french doors are built for the sunroom...and the walls are painted...and the ceiling patched, plastered, and painted....and the closet doors built. well, ok, probably more like couple/three months, but progress is progress .

as with anything ~105 years old there's still some 'character' here and there, but all in all i think it cleaned up pretty good considering the shape it was in (two layers of carpet, both stapled down, lots of deep gouges from improperly moving furniture, and at some point a previous owner decided that paint store recommendation be damned, you can stain pine, you just have to pour the darkest stain you can find in the middle of the room and mop it around til the floor is black). the thresholds did not exist previously, there was just wide end grain gaps between the rooms from a century of shrinkage and settling. those are new boards set in (routed out the floor with a handheld router and set the thresholds in flush).

waterlox for sealer and top coat, garnet shellac in the middle for color (satin on top, just looks glossy cause it was applied today, still wet). these particular floor boards have gotten quite dark over their century in this house, so it only took one coat of the garnet to darken them quite a bit (other than the new thresholds which wound up taking 3 or 4 to match). other rooms are taking two or three to make them like this one.

[Joe Shinall]

Nothing like old wood floors. Looking to build a house in the next year and I'm trying to find some salvaged wood floors instead of buying new. Just love the character. Nice floor Neal.

[Neal Clayton]

if you don't find anyone local lemme know when you're ready and looking, i know a few places around new orleans/biloxi that are still working on salvaged stuff from the hurricane (either salvaged old growth trees that got topped, or salvaged floors remilled from flooded houses).

the trim in the house i'm working on has all been replicated that way, in lieu of years of paint stripping. got a truckload of salvaged old growth boards from a guy down in biloxi who was milling hurricane topped trees after the storm.

[Jacob Robinson]

thats a beautiful floor. Reminds me of a floor I helped install, Mesquite, random widths and lengths (thats what they called it, was really random lengths, 3 different widths) the dark color is just fantastic.

[Neal Clayton]

thanks, i've been using this schedule for awhile on many things (trim, doors and windows too). the garnet is really close in color to the both heartwood color of the old growth pine and the waterlox, so it creates a nice translucent depth in the finish. i like it alot for this particular species.

have often wondered whether people actually use mesquite for such things (we don't have it locally here). i love the look of it, but would seem from the grain patterns that it would be kinda hard to keep straight and flat?

if only it were available in longer lengths, since the days of us getting these room-length old growth longleaf pine floors are long gone, except for salvaged lumber from old buildings. and that's the only tree that produces distinct wavy/figured grain patterns we have native to this area, outside of butchering red oak logs to make small quantities of 'tiger oak'.

[Jacob Robinson]

The mesquite we used was pretty solid in terms of flat and straight, the main trouble we ran into turned out to be the fact that mesquite is so hard, that the nails won't set well sometimes (we actually broke a flooring nailer on the stuff). The stuff we got was supplied by a small mill in east(ish) texas. As I said, random widths and lengths, which means there was no board over 3 feet long in the entire floor. the last trouble is that a fair number of knots where loose/missing, which we solved by filling with black epoxy before we sanded and finished. I wish i had a photo of it to post, because it was beautiful. I'll try and get some more info about where we got it, and a picture if I can find the right people, if you are interested.

-edit-

this is not the actual floor we did, but the color and grain is similar, just imagine this with 3 different widths of board.
http://www.mesquitefloors.com/images/625tungoil.jpg

[Neal Clayton]

yeah, that looks really nice. the short lengths on it would make it great for a parquet pattern, too, i suppose.

i actually have our 'local option' for that downstairs, a herringbone tiger oak floor that's assembled of ~2" x ~2 foot lengths. only problem is you waste so much of a red oak log to produce any significant quantity of figured usable boards. not very cost effective for anything but veneer.

thankfully the previous owners were not dumb enough to cover that with white carpet, in fact i'm pretty sure it still has the original finish, looks to be a linseed oil/pine tar concoction with waxy shellac on top. i'm surprised at how stable it is, there are lots of odd grain patterns around the room, but it's pretty flat and level even after all this time. i'm guessing on either an abundance of nails (they're also face nailed), or gluing them down with tar in addition to the nails. i found that done on the sunroom behind the above pine floor (you can see a little in the pics), it has a square parquet pattern with a walnut border. it was pre-assembled with a nifty butterfly type fastener that had one sharp edge that they just beat flush into opposing boards, they then set the squares glued to the subfloor with black tar. i've heard from others that they also used those butterfly fasteners behind butt jointed moldings (like between casings and toe caps). i've looked for them but can't seem to find them available anymore, just those pinned picture frame type fasteners, which don't seem like they would hold nearly as well.

yet another example of those old timers being pretty slick, and generally doing things better than we do .

[Van Huskey]

Very nice. Some people rue the "wall to wall" years of the 70s but I figure it just saved a lot of floors from further abuse.

I look back at my childhood when I was "ashamed" of my families floors since we didn't have carpet. I now go to my mothers home and I am astounded, she still has the gorgeous wide plank oak floors in every room except the kitchen and batrooms, that she has meticulously maintained and the rugs she has covering portions of the floor are 100+ year old and look like new. I must say I am not ashamed of them any more!