All floorboards are not created equal
My last post and it was just dawning on me that all floorboards are not created equal, so the day after this discovery and I decided to take a random sample of twenty boards and measure the widths of each of these boards only to discover that out of twenty boards there were eight different widths, no wonder things were going all wonky.
So a new job to add to my CV of measuring boards widths and labelling the boards with little sticky labels. This took a fair amount of time and when completed I had about ten widths of floorboard. Now all neatly labelled and stacked against the bedroom wall they were ready to get laid and laid by numbers.
Each row would be a certain width, or a certain width plus or minus a millimetre. I’d work across the room decreasing the width as I went and hopefully all would be good in the world of floor boarding. As the work progressed things were still a bit wobbly, not totally askew as it had started but little gaps were beginning to appear. I resigned myself to a slightly imperfect result, there was no way that I could make this perfect, the timber I was working with wasn’t perfectly uniform, nor was it perfectly straight, it would have to be a little teeny bit gappy. Actually as I worked on I began to love the gap and found ways of reducing its impact, the best tool I had for this were a set of three spreaders (clamps in reverse) I’d borrowed from the college where I work. These could be used to persuade tongues into grooves and sometimes could be used to bend boards into places they weren’t supposed to bend.
The timber itself was generally just a bit short of ideal, there were little dints in it, there were holes where I’d extracted nails, there were smaller holes where I’d drilled in my fixing screws (invisible ones meant for the tongues which tended to shatter the tongues, so now embedded into the surface). The ends weren’t perfectly square as sometimes the mitre saw would be fooled by an un-squared off edge that would make a 90 degree angle a slightly off 89 degree one. It was all a bit tricky, still the results were beginning to look good despite all this, it was all taking on an antique lustre, not exactly planned but a bit shabby while remaining chic.
Now I know there will be originality freaks out their sobbing over me lifting floorboards and refitting them askew but the reality is that a selection of trades had been digging around in them over the years. What were once finely tuned Victorian joints were now littered with the remains of plumbers sawing up inspection holes and electricians snapping up boards to lay ring mains. I also had to insulate below the boards and as I lifted them I found plenty of evidence of ancient woodworm infestations. These infestations were thankfully only in the floorboards and mainly in the tongues and grooves but they’d really deteriorated the boards in places and had to be removed, so all in all there was no way to rescue every room, I was doing my best to rescue at least one room.
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The idea was to grade and chop out the bad bits and out of two rooms I could perhaps make one original floor, or so I thought. Lifting ancient floorboards isn’t an exact science, I employed dozens of methods to get boards up complete and unscarred but the reality is that it’s a very difficult to lift a board and not to damage it. In the end, after my timber grading, the lopping off of woodwormy timber, the disposal of cracked and shattered board, the result was that I only had enough timber to cover 2/3 of my intended floorspace.
Buggerations.
By this time I had spent too much time on the job and it was now time to resort to quickly finding more timber, but there were only a few options left:
- The living room… no, I couldn’t face losing that room.
- The kitchen diner… no the wood was different.
- The only option left was the bedroom where I was residing, not great but it had to be done. I had no intention of moving out of this room so I had to devise another cunning plan.
Arising bright and early with a pulled muscle in my neck and shoulder I gritted my teeth and started work.
First, empty my dresser of drawers and unburden my bulging wardrobe of all items of clothing, then move all ephemera out of the room into the room next door… lotsa stuff.
Next manhandle the wardrobe and drawers from one end of the room to the other. My wardrobe is top heavy and a monstrous thing to shift.
Lift carpets, expose the boards at the end of the room and remove these boards, a nasty little job to do in a tight space.
Once these boards were carefully removed then fetch a sheet of spruce plywood from the garage, teeter up the stairs with it and drop it into the place vacated by the boards.
Manhandle the wardrobe and drawers back into place and sprinkle liberally with clothes and the missing drawers.
Dismantle computer and computer desk, remove bedside table, move room contents from the middle of the room to the end now occupied by the wardrobe.
Lift carpet, remove skirting board and wrestle with the boards in the middle of the room until there’s not a board left.
Go back to the garage, fetch a sheet of hardwood plywood, teeter back up the stairs, drop it into place and relax.
Phew…
Only a matter now of shifting everything back into the room, patching up some missing holes with spruce by sawing it to fit the holes near the door and beside the bed.
This took an entire day, it was a nasty little job, once completed I had a new pile of wood.
Grading time now, again a keen eye and the keen blade of the mitre saw left a neat pile of good timber and another pile which went on to swell my piles of firewood. I also de-nailed boards, cut up firewood and generally had lots more sweaty work to do in this grading of the boards ready for use.
Were there enough boards?
Well I’d measured and I’d figured that I needed seven more rows of floorboards, another cunning plan and I was building a little wall of floorboards in the room – the one I was boarding out – the wall ran from one end of the room to the other, if the wall managed to get over seven boards high then I should have enough.
Eight rows later, waheeee.
Now all I needed to do was lay them, fit them in around the radiators, sand them, fill all the holes and cracks, sand them again, varnish, re-fit the skirting, paint the woodwork, re-touch the paintwork, fix up the doors, curtains and rails, light switches and plug sockets and hey-presto it would be done. Oh and furnish the rooms too.
A five minute job.