Cutting floorboards for the #roundhouse, and I've just cut five square metres of (by our standards) really nice quality flooring from a single log. Small wins!
@SiobhanVohn To be honest, I'm not sure I would have done it myself. I suggested to Lucy that she should get tongue and groove floorboards from the builders merchants – it would save a huge amount of planing or sanding, and help keep out draughts. But she wanted floorboards from the wood, and I do fully respect that.
@simon_brooke yes, I'm with Lucy. Much more special to have made everything oneself and to have sourced the materials from local land. 😍
Also with you though, as I can't cope with drafts 😆
@SiobhanVohn I'm thinking (but it's Lucy's house, it's her decision) of 'paying' the seams, in the way in which ship's decks used to be caulked. These logs are not perfectly dry, no matter how tight we lay the boards they'll shrink a bit and there will be gaps.
'Paying' is a technique of stuffing the gaps with a loose yarn of cotton and then sealing it with either tar or a mastic (I'm old enough to have used a red lead putty, although that is now illegal). It creates a striped effect.
@simon_brooke good plan. Lovely for Lucy to have personal things from friends lining the roundhouse too, keeping it warm. I use my late fathers old wool picnic blanket (delightful 70s brown and orange checked pattern!) as a draught excluder at my front door. It makes me smile every time I look at it, think of dad still keeping me warm.
@simon_brooke@SiobhanVohn If you are cutting the boards yourself I presume that they are random widths to make the best use of the timber. Laying a floor with random width timber is a bit of a job but the results are far more pleasing to the eye than a standardized builders merchants' job.
I've faked a random planked floor (replacing a chipboard floor in our 1790s house) by mixing three different widths (150, 180 & 200mm) which fools the casual observer.
@EricBranse@SiobhanVohn I'm cutting at 125mm, 150mm, and 175mm, all at 50mm thick. If I can get 200mm out of it I can't afford to waste that on floorboards, it has to go for structural timber; at the other end of the scale, if all I can get is 100mm, it's scarcely worth bothering about as saw timber.
But yes, it will make laying a bit more of a pain (but more characterful when finished).
Add comment