dadiOH wrote:


I'm thinking he would be much better off using unsplit lumber. Elsewhere,
you said he was planing on 8" wide boards. If they are
split, there isn't much meat under the nail head to keep them down
and in place when they cup. And they they WILL cup.

You didn't mention what kind of wood he was considering. Used to be
a lot of softwood floors and those wear pretty fast. When they do,
nails are left proud. Less a potential for that with hardwood or
even SYP.

I'm pretty sure he said the boards were Hemlock, but I'll have to double
check on that. Mine are Hemlock I believe and as I said in a different
reply, they run 14-16" wide. Ours are 27 years old and they don't cup at
all, but they do grow and shrink in the different seasons, as you might
expect. When the wood stove is burning the cracks between them are double
the size they are in the summer time.

Then there are the cracks. He would be hard put to lay 8" boards and
get the board edges chock-a-block. The cracks will fill up with crud.

You definitely put up with that if you butt the edges of floor boards
together - they do move in the seasons. The vacuum pretty well clears the
crud out, although there have had to get down there and work some of the
stuff out. Not often - but it's certainly an occassional requirement.
Because our cracks can be pretty significant in the heating season, it may
actually be easier for us to keep them cleaned out with the vacuum.


My wife wound up with a rustic log house last year. The second floor
has 1 1/2 T&G SYP floors. Planks are about 8" wide, maybe a bit
less. There are cracks up to 1/2" wide between boards; most are 1/8"
or so. Even though they are T&G, the boards were faced nailed and
the heads set down a bit. All the nail holes are torn, look like
hell. So do the cracks. Top was made rustic via whatever the
coarsest grit is for a drum floor sander. The dings left by it add
to the "rustic" flavor. The whole thing looks like hell.


I remember you mentioning the log home acquisition. My second floor is the
same as yours. I hate it. It has moved over time, much more than the
floors downstairs. Huge movement in some places. I'm still thinking about
what I am going to do to ultimately address that, but it's so far down the
road in our plans right now, that I only casually think about it. When the
time comes, I may just rip it all up and lay something new. But... that's
way out in the future for me.



Depends on what one wants I guess but if it were me I'd split the
width of the boards but not the thickness. I'd have T&G milled into
at least the edges and the bottoms relieved..

You are right in that it really does depend on what one wants. I love the
floors in my first floor. They are a perfect fit for the feel of our home.
The gaps between boards are just part of that. They would be an awful fit
in a different type of home though. I'm going to be knocking out some walls
and opening areas up soon, as well as changing the layout of rooms, etc. At
that time, I'll probably invest a few days and pull all of the flooring up,
re-lay it tight, and go on from there. It will still move, but we can
minimize some of those gaps. The floors need refinishing now - 27 years of
traffic. Mostly, we're talking about finish issues and not about wear of
the wood itself. I'm very surprised at how well the wood has held up to
traffic over all these years. The amount of wear to the wood is very, very
minimal. But again - I say that because some things look perfectly in place
in a log home, that would look perfectly out of place in a raised ranch.

--

-Mike-