Surface Blog

Welcome to Surface, a blog by Carlisle Wide Plank Floors. Join us in discussion about hardwood flooring wood grains & styles, home decor, green building products, trends and more.

Stunning New York City home gets some stunning Carlisle floors to match

Posted by Christine Halvorson

Bulson Managment, a general contractor that builds and renovates residential and commerical properties in the New York City area, sent along these photos of Carlisle floors recently laid down in a renovation project on Franklin Street in New York. The Carlisle floors included 1,450 square feet of 6- to 9-inch Antique Oak and 1,450 square feet of 3- to 7-inch Country Grade White Oak mixed together. Both have a Tung Oil finish.

Posted on September 4, 2009 at 11:07 AM in Green Building • Home Building & Contracting • (0) Comments
On Broadway, our Carlisle crews have beautified J. Crew’s decor

Posted by Christine Halvorson

Carlisle has now had its floors installed in a number of J.Crew retail stores around the country and the photos below show the latest project, this time on Broadway in Manhattan. The floors and dressing rooms, plus the cabinetry, were all done in custom-graded milled barn wood. These boards were reclaimed by Carlisle from an old building. For just the perfect look, the old barn boards were sorted to use just the medium- to dark-toned ones, and they were also re-milled to remove any of the original saw marks from when the boards were first made into a building. For this Manhatten project, the boards were then given an Extra White Woca Oil finish.

According to Peter Switzer in our Stoddard, New Hampshire offices, Carlilse has been working with the J.Crew stores for some time. Our floors can be seen in their Hampton, New York location, plus three others in New York City, with a fourth one soon to follow. (We’ll be sure to let you know when.) Our floors are also in J. Crew’s Malibou, California location. Here’s a peak at the J.Crew Women’s Store we did on Madison Avenue in New York—complete with Hickory in a herringbone pattern.

Posted on July 10, 2009 at 01:16 PM in Green Building • (0) Comments
A floor to match the boards of an old ship

Posted by Christine Halvorson

Sam Lindstrom, a homeowner and customer from Lakewood, Washington, installed his own Carlisle floor recently, with the help of his uncle. He was kind enough to send along these "before and after" photos of the project, showing his once-tiled floors now turned into a beautiful Antique Oak. (“Before” is above and “After” is below.) We think the makeover works beautifully, don’t you?

Sam came to Carlisle for his floors back in December and began the installation in February or March of this year. He wanted the Antique Oak to match an existing floor in the circa-1949 house that a previous owner had installed. That floor actually came from an old ship! The previous owner had taken the ship’s boards and had them cut into flooring. Reclaimed wood! We like that here at Carlisle.

Here’s how we describe our Antique Oak:

Taken from old timbers found primarily in barns along the Ohio River Valley, our Antique Oak flooring has an extremely fine and figured grain structure, referred to as “tigering.” This handsome Oak wood radiates warm and “nutty” English brown tones, giving each Antique Oak floor a distinguished Old World look. You can almost feel the events witnessed by this Antique Oak. It exhibits rift grain, occasional knots and nail holes, while retaining the rigid strength of new oak.

Got a question for us? Write us here by clicking onto “comments” just below.

Posted on June 22, 2009 at 02:09 PM in Green Building • (0) Comments
Really “green” home part of Portsmouth sustainability festival tour

Posted by Christine Halvorson

Back on March 25, we told you about Cheryl Parker and Marc Batcheldor and how they are building one of the greenest homes in the country, over in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, not so far from our Carlisle headquarters. We're quite proud to be part of this project, which is now about to be revealed to the public in the Portsmouth Sustainability Tour. Cheryl and Marc's house is featured on the May 16 "Sustainability at Home" tour featuring homes and organizations that are demonstrating sustainable building materials or other energy saving practices. Their home appears on this map as #7: The Zero Net Energy Home! Cheryl and Marc intend that their home will achieve platinum level LEED certification and their zero net energy designation means they will produce as much energy as they use. Their home is a 1,350-square-foot passive solar that they designed and engineered themselves. Each material they used in their home was considered for where it was manufactured, its chemical content and its sustainability--and that's why they chose Carlisle Wide Plank Antique Heart Pine, crafted in 4-inch to 10-inch random widths. March and Cheryl installed the floor themselves.

If you're in the Portsmouth, New Hampshire neighborhood on May 16, why not drop in to the Sustainability at Home tour and see Marc and Cheryl's home up close?

Posted on May 11, 2009 at 01:57 PM in Green Building • (0) Comments
Carlisle adds new floors to Vermont’s historic Hermitage Inn

Posted by Christine Halvorson

We were quite honored to have supplied the floors for the Hermitage Inn in West Dover, Vermont recently. The top photo shows the dining room of the inn, and the bottom shows the pub area.

The inn was looking for a floor that was historically accurate to the time period -- the structure dates back to the 1840s--and that was sustainably harvested to be in step with the inn's Green Initiative. As Glen Renagan, our sales and design consultant, says, we were able to meet the inn's needs on both counts. We did about 2500 square feet of the restoration project in Carlisle's 10 to 17-inch Old Growth Eastern White Pine and another 2,500 square feet was in the 8 to 12-inch Old Growth Heart Pine. Read more about how Carlisle's floors are sustainably grown.

Posted on April 29, 2009 at 01:41 PM in Green Building • (0) Comments