Reclaimed Wood

Reclaimed wood is a specialty area of flooring that we've been getting involved with in the past few years. I love historical buildings, styles, and materials, and there is a mystique about the stupendous timbers available to the early settlers. Some of first European explorers reported seeing huge savannahs of walnut, oak, and longleaf pine, each one six feet or more in diameter and a hundred feet tall. And you can find details in Old Salem of large, colonial-era table tops made of a single slab of wood.


Although it's a little trendy right now, the concept of reclaimed wood has been around since the original forests started disappearing, and because of its authenticity and heritage, I think a tasteful use of reclaimed wood is a style with a lot of staying power--not merely a fad that will shortly go the way of pickled-white floors and fingerblock parquet.

Here are pictures of a few reclaimed flooring projects we've done in the past year. Each project's wood came from a different source, and each one has a story to go along with it.

 

The photo above is of old oak salvaged from Appalachian barns and threshing floors. The homeowner created a tasteful, barn-style room for his private office and study. The natural oil finish on these boards shows the warm, luminous patina that you can only find with old-growth wood.



 
The second picture (left) is of a new house floored with long leaf heart pine planks that came out of the old Harriett & Henderson cotton mills in Henderson, NC. Some of the neat features of this floor include "rivers" of whale oil running through the soft grain of certain boards, left over from a time when the mill machinery was lubricated with sperm whale oil. Occasional boards also showed slices of wood-threaded pegs that originally held the beams together inside the mill building. 120 years after harvesting, the wood is in great shape and living a second life in this new home.

The final photo shows more heart pine. In this case the wood was carefully removed from an old farmhouse in Sampson County, the ancestral home of the family who had this house built. The planks were nearly an inch and a quarter thick and anywhere from four to eight inches wide--truly magnificent wood dimensions that shows how these old farmhouses were able to stand for centuries through termites, hurricanes, humidity, war, poverty, and finally abandonment. (I'm sure there were good times in there too.) On the ceiling you can also see a couple of the immense framing timbers incorporated into the structure of the new home much as they served in the old.

In the past few years I've been fortunate to establish relationships with quite a number of suppliers, salvage companies, and reclaimed mills around North Carolina and the Southeast. Chances are pretty good we can locate any type of old-growth, rustic, or extinct species you might be interested in for your own home. These projects offer a kind of satisfaction for both contractor and homeowner that go well beyond simple economic transaction--the satisfaction of tasteful design, local heritage, and the intrinsic value of fine wood.

Kent Will

Old Town Wood Floors

336-575-0219

www.oldtownwoodfloors.com

A little love for southern oak

Gnarly old white oak in Davie County.

Generally speaking, northern and Appalachian hardwoods are superior in quality to southern hardwoods due to several factors:

1) A shorter growing season for Appalachian and northern trees means tighter growth rings and more uniform appearance.

2) The frequency of tornadoes, hurricanes, and big thunderstorms in the South causes "shake" to occur quite frequently. Shake is when the wood fibers in a living tree split along the grain due to wind stress. Milled into flooring, shake appears as a small flaky bit of wood that is partially detached from the main board.

3) Southern oak is ornery like a mule! Oak species are different in the Piedmont and lowland South than in the Appalachians. They tend to be tougher, more reactive to moisture changes, coarse, and wide-grained.

In this post, however, I'd like to mention a few things to appreciate about southern oak. Much of the oak flooring in the 50's and 60's came out of the Ozark Mountains, and we encounter it often during refinishes. It typically has a lot more color variation than that straight, uniform Appalachian oak you see in furniture. There are many applications where I certainly wouldn't use it, but as long as the mill is rigorous about culling defects like shake, it's perfectly suitable for use in flooring if you like the appearance.















As you can see in this picture, it's full of variegations, and strong color contrasts. The warm climate and native soils influence those white-to-olive streaks. The fibers are coarse like hickory, but southern white oak has that "swampy" rustic look that you also see in character heart pine.

So while it may not have the tightest grain, or that perfect, uniform appearance that you want in today's high end homes, I think southern white oak deserves a little love now and then.

hardwoods below ground level

Recent advances in technology have made hardwood floors in underground (below grade) basements a safe and reliable option. All concrete floors emit water vapor, and basements in particular are notorious for damp conditions and water seepage through the slab. However, as long as proper precautions are taken and the appropriate products used, you can still have a hardwood floor in your basement that is fully covered by the manufacturer's warranty.

In the case of my latest installation, this involved a number of steps which I've outlined below. Hopefully this information will help other homeowners in evaluating the potential of their basements for hardwood flooring.

Preparation

A chat with the homeowners, and a quick inspection after a record rainfall, revealed no evident problems with water seepage through the floor. The basement was clean and mold-free. A hygrometer measurement indicated moderately high levels of humidity compared to the rest of the house--about 70%. The homeowners purchased a dehumidifier and a hygrometer to address this issue. Within hours the humidity had dropped to 50%, which is a nice median percentage. Maintained year-round, the floor should experience minimal swelling or shrinking.

The concrete floor underneath the carpet had been polished and treated with an epoxy or oil finish. Using a diamond-blade grinder attachment on a buffer, I removed the coating and achieved a light surface texture. These steps ensured maximum adhesion when it came time to glue down the wood floor.

original surface

prepared for adhesive

With a clean substrate, it was time to measure the vapor emissions from the concrete, using two calcium chloride tests from Taylor Tools. I placed a dish containing a known weight of calcium chloride on the concrete floor, enclosed it under a plastic dome that sealed tightly to the concrete, and waited 65 hours. 

Then, with the help of a friendly pharmacist, I had the dishes re-weighed, calculated the increased weight, and ran the figures through the formula provided by the manufacturer. The test indicated that emissions were just a hair over 5 pounds of water per 1000 square feet per 24 hours--fairly dry conditions that, especially in light of the excessive rainfall this summer, indicated no major concerns with the concrete slab.

Products

For extra security, and to allow room for possible increase in moisture emissions down the road, we used Bona's R851 adhesive, which is warranted to protect wood floors up to 12 pounds of vapor emission. Since our slab was right around 5 pounds, the hardwood floors should be amply protected. The calcium chloride test results were independently verified by a lab, giving both Old Town Wood Floors and the homeowner proof that the adhesive warranty conditions were complied with.

As a second precaution, this time to guard against possible elevated humidity in the future, we used Owens Plankfloor engineered wood instead of the typical solid oak. With multiple layers of hardwood plies glued perpendicularly to each other, the danger of humidity-related swelling or shrinking is significantly reduced. Engineered wood can remain stable under more extreme moisture changes than solid wood. The best feature of the Owens Plankfloor products, however, is that on top of the engineered foundation, each board has a 4.5mm thickness of solid, unfinished oak. Thus we were able to match the floors in this house both above and below grade, using the same grade of red oak, and employed identical sanding and finishing techniques for a flawless match across all three stories of this house. And just like the rest of the house, the basement floors can be refinished multiple times down the road.

 

Introduction

Welcome to the blog of Old Town Wood Floors! We're a small company in Winston-Salem, NC with a passion for superior wood floors. As the owner, I'd like this blog to serve a couple purposes:

1) as a source of information and design inspiration for homeowners who want something a step above the typical "contractor special" floors

2) as an outlet to develop thoughts pertaining to flooring design, woodworking, local and historic architecture, and related topics.

I hope you'll follow along and add your voice to the comments section.

Kent Will
Old Town Wood Floors
336-575-0219
www.oldtownwoodfloors.com