Malcolm Schweizer
11-10-2014, 2:00 PM
I'll try to keep this short and to be nice, but I do need to explain how I got into this mess. My neighbor is restoring a beautiful old home built in 1803, and unfortunately he has done everything completely wrong. I am now going to try to help him salvage what he has done. I love the guy. He's very nice, and well-intended, but he doesn't know a thing about restoring a house as far as the technical aspects, and did everything the way he thought it should be done, which is basically the absolute wrong way.
My neighbor wanted to refinish his original heart pine 200 year-old floors, but he wanted to put a subfloor in under it. Why? Well he wanted to make it sound proof, and he also wanted to put a waterproof layer of tar paper under it. By the way, he not only put tar paper in the subfloor, but he had the tar paper go 6" up the wall under the baseboard, in his words, "so that if water ever gets in it can't do any damage." Right- so now you have a wading pool for a subfloor- that seems safe. Read again the first paragraph- that's all I can say. So this floor has lasted 200 years just fine- maybe a few termite holes, divots, and what-not (read: It had lots of character), but otherwise it's held up 200 years. Then my neighbor decides the best way to refinish the floors was to pull them all up. When I say pull them up, I mean with a crowbar, ripping all the nails out, and tearing every board at the edges. It is quite the mess.
The wood is now sitting in a ghastly looking pile at the workshop where I volunteer teach. He is expecting the boards to magically be run through the board fixing machine and come out nice and shiny with the exact same amount of board feet that he started out with. (If this doesn't make sense, please, once again, read paragraph 1). To be honest, I want him to realize this is futile and give me all the wood to make furniture and boats out of, but I feel like what he did was so abominable that I actually want to at least try to salvage what I can and get him maybe enough wood to finish the greatroom. It would be my woodworking karma to at least put as much of the wood back into the home as I can. I literally imgaine the original craftsmen looking down from above, crying as he pulled... no... RIPPED each board from its place. The creaking of the boards was their screams.
So I have to take each board, true up the jagged edges (and believe me, it's so bad that I could more easily resaw a log into lumber than fix what is here), and route a tongue and groove. Ahhh, but in order to get the most board feet out of this pile of splinters, I was thinking about doing a splined joint. Much harder to install, but I would gain a little bit more width per board (not much, but every bit counts) and the setup would be much simpler to do a groove on each edge than to do a tongue and groove.
So the question is- Other than a more difficult install, is there a reason not to do a splined wood floor in order to make the most of the small amount of wood I will have to work with?
My neighbor wanted to refinish his original heart pine 200 year-old floors, but he wanted to put a subfloor in under it. Why? Well he wanted to make it sound proof, and he also wanted to put a waterproof layer of tar paper under it. By the way, he not only put tar paper in the subfloor, but he had the tar paper go 6" up the wall under the baseboard, in his words, "so that if water ever gets in it can't do any damage." Right- so now you have a wading pool for a subfloor- that seems safe. Read again the first paragraph- that's all I can say. So this floor has lasted 200 years just fine- maybe a few termite holes, divots, and what-not (read: It had lots of character), but otherwise it's held up 200 years. Then my neighbor decides the best way to refinish the floors was to pull them all up. When I say pull them up, I mean with a crowbar, ripping all the nails out, and tearing every board at the edges. It is quite the mess.
The wood is now sitting in a ghastly looking pile at the workshop where I volunteer teach. He is expecting the boards to magically be run through the board fixing machine and come out nice and shiny with the exact same amount of board feet that he started out with. (If this doesn't make sense, please, once again, read paragraph 1). To be honest, I want him to realize this is futile and give me all the wood to make furniture and boats out of, but I feel like what he did was so abominable that I actually want to at least try to salvage what I can and get him maybe enough wood to finish the greatroom. It would be my woodworking karma to at least put as much of the wood back into the home as I can. I literally imgaine the original craftsmen looking down from above, crying as he pulled... no... RIPPED each board from its place. The creaking of the boards was their screams.
So I have to take each board, true up the jagged edges (and believe me, it's so bad that I could more easily resaw a log into lumber than fix what is here), and route a tongue and groove. Ahhh, but in order to get the most board feet out of this pile of splinters, I was thinking about doing a splined joint. Much harder to install, but I would gain a little bit more width per board (not much, but every bit counts) and the setup would be much simpler to do a groove on each edge than to do a tongue and groove.
So the question is- Other than a more difficult install, is there a reason not to do a splined wood floor in order to make the most of the small amount of wood I will have to work with?