The Kitchen Floor (Heaps)
Heaps, my friend, are the constant.
Let me tell you about heaps.
There are the heaps of lath that you tear out of the walls, and the heaps of plaster and horsehair that come with it. There are heaps of old floorboards in the basement that grow as you remove them from the bathrooms, and at the end of the day there are heaps of filthy clothes on the floor of your bedroom as you fall into bed, tender-skinned from the scrubbing you’ve given yourself in the shower. Heaps, my friend, are the constant.
tra la la…troo loo loo.
Heaps. The sheer material volume of the process of demolishing and building is something I had not really anticipated. You imagine in your head, tra la la, take down this wall, troo loo loo, build it up again, but what you don't realize - at least not if you're me - is that you have to put all the stuff you take down somewhere, and that before you figure that out a delivery will arrive with the new studs, insulation, and wallboard and all of that has to sit together in a heap until you find the time to get it all the eff up. And since we were trying to keep costs down and didn't own a car, we'd preorder materials from Home Depot for the next project and the one after that, all at the same time, which meant that the heaps only grew, and stayed, for so long that when we finally moved them you could see their chalky outlines in the accumulated dust.
It is never just removal and re-use.
Of course the heap situation was made worse because we were preserving rather than binning and replacing. so those studs, floorboards, moldings, windows, doors, shelves--all of it had to be stored. Daily, we dragged rubbermaid trash bins from room to room collecting the heaps and bringing them to the basement (aka the mother heap) from whence we'd later extract the materials as we needed them.
Now when I tell you that I made the kitchen floor out of the original boards that we took out of the kitchen and bathrooms, you can better understand the weight of this statement, how it is never just removal and re-use, clean, easy, but rather how even the seemingly passive steps - stacking, storage - are demanding. You will also understand a bit better why the kitchen floor went down before the bathroom floors were even closed up, and while we were still lugging heavy things in and out over it. It was because of the heaps, people: we literally did not have the room to store all that wood anymore. It had to go down.
To this day I hate doing these kinds of cuts.
So one day we moved everything to the perimeter of the kitchen and I measured, dividing the space up and developing a pattern that would work with the eventual counters and appliances and would hug the perimeter of the bathroom wall. I drew it in pencil on the rosin paper that covered the underlayment I'd put down, and later that day I went down to the basement and started de-nailing the old floorboards and passing them, lengthwise, through the table saw. It took three cuts per board, slicing off the old tongues and grooves and splitting them into pieces of about 2 inches wide. For those of you not familiar with machine cutting, a rip cut lengthwise with the grain is an arduous cut, especially on nail-embedded, old growth wood, requiring a really sharp blade, a good motor, and not inconsiderable force to push/pull it through. I ran through several blades and often had to take breaks when the machine started smoking. To this day I hate doing these kinds of cuts.
I wanted this floor to look, if not original, then at least contemporaneous.
Eventually I brought these long, thin pieces up to the addition where I used the chopsaw to cut them into smaller, angled pieces necessary to create a chevron pattern. I chose this pattern for a number of reasons: first, because when you are working with scrap wood you want to use smaller lengths as you're very unlikely to have many long pieces intact. Additionally, it's been my experience that when you are trying to increase a sense of space in a room, a smaller repeated pattern can help trick the eye into thinking that there's more acreage than there really is. Also, it's just more correct for the time period. Generally, older = smaller scale, and I wanted this floor to look, if not original, then at least contemporaneous. Finally, as I've mentioned before, this is a small, hall-like kitchen, and I felt quite sure that adding in a statement floor would help to give it a specialness that would counterbalance its humble dimensions.
Why bother putting good floor where it's hidden, you might ask?
What if the next person wanted to use this space differently?
When it came to laying down, I first set aside the few strong, long, intact pieces of tongue and groove for the sections that would eventually go under the cabinets and the refrigerator. Why bother putting good floor where it's hidden, you might ask? Because part of my philosophy is that I'm building for future use, too. What if the next person wanted to use this space differently? I would hope they would keep the floor; ensuring that the whole thing was of a piece was my way of making that more likely. I affixed the cut pieces to the subfloor with a nail gun, and worked my way up and down the room, filling in the pattern as I went and frequently checking my alignment. At the beginning I selected the loveliest, most even slices, but by the end when my heap had disappeared I was reduced to fishing around the literal bottom of the scrap barrels to find the last few grotty, chewed up, partially water damaged ones. As long as they fit the dimensions, they got used. You can still spot those less-pristine pieces, a little caved in, a little gouged. For a while it bothered me, but now they serve as a reminder of the age of the boards. This is what responsible re-use looks like: imperfect.
At the beginning I selected the loveliest, most even slices.
Responsible re-use also demands extra steps, which for the floor included mixing a resin and sawdust paste to fill in the bigger cracks. Finally, we sanded and sealed -- but only months and months later, when the heaps were finally, finally gone.
