Back to the Floor

The flush-cut saw did its job beautifully. I can't say enough about the simple elegance and beauty of this tool. Nice and flat on one side with an offset handle that is reversible. If you hold it just right (not too tightly) it finds its own path and rips through oak with a sweet swishing sound. My teacher in college had a saying for how to hold the violin. You take the neck of the violin in your left hand and hold it as if you have a goose by the neck--not too tight!! or you will strangle it! OK, that sounds a little weird but the image stuck with me (and it has application to a variety of things in life).

Now the kitchen floor is completely up. I have pieces of peg board scattered around to cover up gaps in the subfloor, which I'm guessing is original to the house. There are few rotten boards, and I replaced some last night. There are some inexplicable patches from the past, like this one to the right. WTF, right?

It will take about a week for the new flooring to get here, so I have some time to finish fixing up the subfloor. We are getting unfinished 3/4 by 2 1/4 strips to nail down, and this will match the rest of the house. I will discuss the finishing in a later post.

During the course of this, I discovered that most oak planking now comes in strips that are between one and four feet. In an older home, you typically see some very long boards--eight feet or longer. Why is this? I was determined to find out, so I called a lumber yard in town. The lumber guy said that there are fewer tall oak trees harvested today, so it is very expensive to get long boards. I'm trying to picture a four-foot oak tree crashing to the ground. And then he asked "Why do you want long boards, anyway?" insuating some insecurity or defect on my part, which was compounded by my inability to come up with an answer.