How We Turned Old Roof Purlins Into A Pretty Dandy Living Room Floor
Some of you have probably guessed that I live in a rural setting. There is a surplus of organic material on the peripheral of my dwelling place, and a lot of that matter gets dragged into my abode. Carpeting and farm should never dwell in the same sentence, let alone the same space, and one day I came home from the library to discover that our living room carpet was lying like a beached whale out on our sidewalk.
So began the wood flooring saga.
We've lived on our farm fifteen years as of this month. It kind of blows my mind that I have owned a piece of ground since I was twenty-one years old. What a lot of work it has been, but I wouldn't trade its lessons for any amount. In North Idaho, there was an affinity for the building of dwellings that were frugally "creative" in both design and composition. We built a new house in 2008, but our place came with two buildings of interesting construction. They were both similar in design, with the underlying architecture of the structure being a single wide trailer. Trusses were then placed above the trailer, and then an entire house was constructed around it. The previous owner of my land built schools, so there were very interesting design features, like dropped ceilings and government surplus paint colors. Let's just say that I wasn't sorry to tear down the aging mouse-magnets when we built our new house.
We did make some interesting discoveries, however. When we tore down the front house we discovered that they had used 4X6" center-cut, #1 grade Douglas fir 15 foot beams to lay the floor of the addition side of the shacks. You can bet we can salvaged those beauties! I'm going to build a guest cabin in the woods on the front section of our property, and it's going to be of post and beam construction out of those lovely pieces of wood. The mummified cat was less exciting, as was the assortment of feminine hygiene products, a Crystal Pepsi can from way back, and the surplus of insulation. I HATE fiberglass.
We salvaged everything we could, and one of the things that we salvaged were the fir roof purlins. We meticulously pulled nails out of tons and tons of the 1X5.5" boards, and my husband announced to our blistered forms that he was going to plane the rough cut boards and use them as flooring in our living room. That might not have been the best time for that announcement, for we wanted to hammer a few nails into his carcass, but such a project seemed so far away that we quickly forgot our flooring angst.
Last summer, right before fair, my husband brought over a huge stack of the purlins to the carport, and the planing began. He spent days planing and sanding boards, and the boards were then stacked in my hallway for "acclimation". This was only to be for a few days, after a few stubbed toes and non-idle threats the project continued. We spent the next couple days dry fitting and cutting the boards into their future home. The boards were then nailed, glued, and nails were counter sunk in. At this point we were all starting to get a little excited about the project, because we could see where it was going, and the going was pretty beautiful.
Dry fitting the pieces, farm house floor puzzle time!
We had already done a similar project to our hall floor, but that time we hand sanded the entire thing. There was no way in Timbuktu that I was going to hand sand an entire living room floor right before the State Fair, so we rented a floor sander. It was the greatest $106 that I have ever spent. We took turns sanding for hours. I still ran the hand held belt sander a lot because I'm sorta short, and as such, not much hurts my back. We listened to a lot of classic rock as we sanded, sanded, and sanded some more. I'm pretty sure that we are all still coughing up sawdust fines. Or that could be fiberglass. Or both, at this point all bets regarding my lungs are off, and yes, I wore safety respiratory gear. Not that it matters much when it comes to sawdust fines.
The boy working really hard at holding down the floor.
Finally we were to stain and seal time. The wood was so pretty that we just rubbed linseed oil into it to bring out the variations of the grain. We then rubbed in a couple coats of high traffic, super-special, $50/gallon, polyurethane floor sealant. The polyurethane was left over from the hallway, and I only used half of the gallon on the whole floor.
All told, with the cost of the sander rental, nails and adhesive, linseed oil and poly, the whole project cost about $140. Yes, there was a lot of labor involved, but I am reasonably sure that a similar floor would cost a LOT more than what we paid, and I love that we put the work into designing and installing it. It's kind of like a functional art project, for I love how it turned out!
This year we are constructing an outdoor oven and a root-cellar, and it is my hope that they turn out half as good as the floor did. My husband is awesome.
And as always, the images in this post were taken on the author's sawdust covered iPhone.