For the past year and a half I have been prepping my land to build my dream home on it. During that process I have cut down around 175 trees, almost exclusively red oak. I saved every log that seemed decent. Then I scored an entire black walnut tree on craigslist. That will be used for inlays and cabinets.
In 5 very long days Dennis from terrific timbers in CT came out with his woodmizer sawmill. We made almost exclusively 1.125-1.25 boards with some beams and 8/4 mixed in. After air drying the first batch of wood for almost a year it was ready for the next step...
I trailered ~1600 square feet of boards from the land to our house. (Yes square feet not board feet) I then cut the boards to 6.5 feet and restacked and snickered them inside my 12 foot cargo trailer in my driveway where it would get lots of sun. We placed a heater, and dehumidifier in the v nose of the trailer and had 5 household fans running in the trailer to ensure good air circulation. Over the next 25 days I removed around 80 gallons more of water and brought the wood from 12 percent moisture content to 4 percent moisture. I then gave the wood another week in the trailer to ensure it was evenly dried.
Once the wood was dry and ready the fun started. I have a one car garage that has enough tools in it to fill a small cabinet shop and a small automotive garage. After storing tools that I didn't need anywhere and everywhere I broke out the band saw and ripped the boards to width. In order to get the best yield from the wood I'm making 3 widths oak and 2 black walnut. Finished flooring was to be 1.75 and 2.25 black walnut and 2.25 3.25 and 4 inch oak. I ripped the boards to .75 over each of those. The band saw worked great for this as it was not affected by the warping, cupping and varied thickness of the boards. I unloaded the entire load of boards into the garage. Fitting 1600 square feet of wood into a one car garage was pretty tight.
After ripping the boards I put the power feeder onto my jointer and face jointed them, this was my first indication of how much sawdust / chips is was going to make during this process.
Next was planing I had to take the boards to under .82 for my flooring shaper cutters. The first pass was very difficult as there was a pretty significant difference in the thickness of the boards. I was also using an old 3 hp planer that was not a great quality machine, but I had gotten it cheep and it was great for every project I had up to this point. Well during the second pass through the planer I'm not really sure how but the chip breaker went into the cutterhead and the entire planer exploded. It was violent enough that it cracked the cast iron chassis of the planer and left a piece of chipbreaker imbedded in the Sheetrock on the wall. Luckily I was not hurt but obviously the planer was toast.
After weighing my options and researching I found a grizzly g0454 planer on Long Island. 2 ferry rides later I was home with my new to me planer. A quick tuneup and I was able to finish the second pass and get all the wood through a third time.
After planing it was back to the jointer this time was edge jointing one edge. This went very fast with the power feeder.
Finally I had a pile of wood that was starting to look really nice. I moved the power feeder to the shaper, set up an outboard fence and started putting on the grooves. I ran the jointed edge against the fence and the rough edge through the cutter. This eliminated the need to re-rip the boards and made them all uniform.
Once all the grooves were on I switched over and started the tongues, this was clearly the fastest part of the process as the boards were all straight and true for the first time. I'm currently half way done with the tongues and will finish them over the weekend.
The last step will be end matching, I know there are people who say this is not necessary however I feel it is very important and with the amount of work already into this project why would I not do it.
I read a lot on this forum and other sites before starting this project. It seemed like the consensus was that it is not worth doing. I understand that view, if you are doing this for money saving purposes it is not worth doing. However it was never my intention to save money, I did this as one step in building my house. When you come into our house the floors, stairs, trim will all be from our land, and the cabinets will be from a tree locally that was hundreds of years old.
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Something special about taking it from start to finish that exceeds the sweat, blood and tears involved. Lets face it, none of us are in this business/hobby to "save" money. 
Originally Posted by Rick Markham
