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.

Reclaimed wood plays a role in first LEED Gold home in Rhode Island

Posted by Christine Halvorson

Carlisle was proud to be part of a high-tech yet very “green” new home-build in the beach community of Narragansett, Rhode Island. The home, which is a project of Green Life Smart Life, intends to demonstrate that families can go green and build a sustainable and realistic home without compromising the environment’s needs. See more about Green Life Smart Life here, and about the Carlisle partnership.

The home, owned by the Hageman family, had its Grand Opening in mid-December 2009. Check out this entry and slideshow about it at the Apartment Therapy blog

Some 3,500 square feet of Carlisle’s reclaimed prefinished milled barnwood with a Bradford umber stain are used throughout the home. Working closely with the owners, we found just the right old barn, which had been slated for demolition, and carefully dismantled it and a created gorgeous wide plank milled barnwood from the re-milled timbers.

The home is now LEED Gold Certified, which means it has received recognition from The Green Building Council, which looks at seven factors in homes: Innovation in Design, Location and Linkage, Sustainable Sites, Water Efficiency, Energy and Atmosphere, Materials and Resources, Indoor Environmental Quality.

This is the sixth house the couple has built and/or remodeled; and though each of the past homes have captured some of the elements of this home, this is the first project to converge all of the features of green and smart.

Here’s the full scoop on our reclaimed floors.

Posted on January 5, 2010 at 05:05 PM in Green Building • (0) Comments
Up in Edmonton, Alberta, reclaimed wood floors gain celebrity status

Posted by Christine Halvorson

A 26-month labor of love up in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, has resulted in a spectacular, mountain chalet-style house designed mostly by the owner and painstakingly filled with materials that celebrate the natural world. Conrad Poirier set out to break the mold for today’s houses. Inspired by the author Sarah Susanka who wrote “The Not So Big House,” Conrad decided to focus on the details, rather than on a massive size, when it was time for he and his wife to build a new home. The end result was a home of 3,100 square feet. “Ours is the smallest house in the neighborhood, but it’s the most unique,” he says now about his home that sits in an upscale neighborhood within the city on the North Saskatchewan River.

“Thinking about the details got me to thinking about what was one of the most important details in a house, and that was the floor, which led me to wonder what I could do that would be different from what everyone else is doing,” Conrad said.

Conrad is a Senior Radiation Therapist at the Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton, and his wife, Carla, is a food scientist and runs her own company, Nutriview. The couple purchased the land for the house in 2004 and began the building process in 2007. In between, Conrad and Carla spent a lot of time designing and researching what they wanted in their custom-built home. When they chose Peter Jungen of Habitat Studio and Workshop, Ltd. in Calgary as their builder and architect, Conrad became the general contractor and designer, working alongside Peter in the process. Conrad doesn’t have a background in building or architecture or design, he just thinks of it all as “kind of a hobby.” (We’ll bring you more about Peter in another blog post in the near future. )

Conrad began touring other custom-built homes in their area, often traveling to Calgary where there was more of them to see. None of the floors he saw excited him very much. He also scoured magazines for ideas. He believes it was in one of them that he saw an ad for Carlisle floors. He had also been visiting home shows and hearing a lot about reclaimed wood, which piqued his interest. Peter had him visit a home where a reclaimed gymnasium floor had been installed, which Conrad said intrigued him.

Above: An interior designer Conrad worked with had the idea for using the oak floors in combination with heated slate in the Poirier home’s entryway._

So, he put in a call to Carlisle headquarters and ultimately reached Dan O’Neil in our Los Angeles Design Center. Dan ended up sending Conrad a package of materials that included videos and photos of all the various wood and stain combinations. Ultmimately, Dan, Peter and Conrad settled together on Northern Red and White Oak that was to be reclaimed from an original 1800s saw mill on Route 2 in Hollywood, West Virginia. Conrad ordered up 1,200 square feet of it.

Read More…

Posted on January 4, 2010 at 08:00 AM in Customer Stories • Green Building • (0) Comments
Explaining “Chain-of-Custody” for Carlisle’s reclaimed wood floors

Posted by Christine Halvorson

Many of our customers come to us asking for reclaimed wood for their future floor project. Our antique or reclaimed wood comes from old barns or abandoned mills, mostly along the eastern seaboard. We work with suppliers who find the structures and view the wood they contain with a critical eye. That’s important to us as we assure that our customers get a high quality product from a structure that may have been standing some 200 years ago!

When we purchase reclaimed wood, we seek certification for it—called a “Chain of Custody” certification—from the Forest Stewardship Council. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is an independent, not for profit, non-government organization. The mission of the Forest Stewardship Council is to support environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial, and economically viable management of the world’s forests.

Here’s how the Forest Council described the “Chain of Custody” certification:

“FSC Chain of Custody is an information trail about the path taken by products from the forest or, in the case of recycled materials, from the reclamation site to the consumer including each stage of processing, transformation, manufacturing, and distribution where progress to the next stage of the supply chain involves a change of ownership.

FSC certification of such management systems is designed to provide a credible guarantee to customers, whether business, government or end consumer, that products which are sold (i.e. invoiced and possibly labeled) with a specified FSC certificate code are originating from well-managed forests, controlled sources, reclaimed materials, or a mixture of these. FSC Chain of Custody certification thereby facilitates the transparent flow of goods made from such materials through the supply chain.”

The certification requires us at Carlisle to document the location of the original structure, when it was built and how it was used. What that all comes down to is a guarantee that our reclaimed wood is a quality product about which customers should have no worries. The certification ensures the integrity of the wood.

Once the antique structure is purchased, it is carefully dismantled and our suppliers select the best, most stable wood to become a Carlisle floor. The wood is cut into usable lengths, sliced into one-inch thick planks and then stacked, kiln-dried, graded and shipped to our Stoddard, New Hampshire headquarters. Once it arrives here, we inspect it again for quality, grade, character, volume and moisture content before we craft it into somebody’s custom floor. Throughout the process, it is tracked for FSC compliance.

*Read more about certifications and our environmental efforts here.*

Posted on December 2, 2009 at 10:33 AM in Green Building • (0) Comments
Thinking “green” sometimes means looking at the product that lasts

Posted by Christine Halvorson

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. In a recent inquiry from a potential customer, M. Carroll, Ms. Carroll noted to our Sales and Design Consultant Dan O’Neil that the “green” way to go may mean buying a quality product that lasts, not one that is going to wear out or look dated after a short time. She wrote:

“…the greenest thing one can do is choose quality that lasts a lifetime, or two. I have a background in Ecology that goes back 30-plus years. Your products are as green as it gets.”

Thank you, M. Carroll!

These days we often get asked about bamboo as a flooring material. Bamboo is a sustainable product, but Dan points out that it hasn’t proven itself over time, like sustainably grown trees have. He likes to stress the “proven timeless quality” of our floors.

Read more about Carlisle’s environmental commitments here.

Posted on November 18, 2009 at 12:47 PM in Green Building • (0) Comments
Sometimes wood reclaimed by Carlisle becomes not a floor, but a beautiful kitchen cabinet

Posted by Christine Halvorson

We’ve written here several times about our relationship with one of our neighbors here in New Hampshire—“Crown Point Cabinetry”:http://www.crown-point.com/. Crown Point, headquartered in Claremont, New Hampshire, specializes in customized cabinetry for period style kitchens, baths, offices, laundry rooms, home bars and more, and they sell direct to the customer. We think all their work is just stunning. Their customers are often requested reclaimed wood for their customized cabinets these days and when that happens, Crown Point turns to us here at Carlisle for supplies from our various reclaimation projects.

Here’s a recent stand-out example of how reclaimed wood can be used to create a modern, sleek and definitely cool look—even when it’s made from what was once an old barn here in New England. Crown Point took the grey barnwood to make the posts and horizontal runners of this kitchen island, and they combined it with cabinetry made of wood but painted black. Stunning, don’t you think?

Posted on November 11, 2009 at 08:33 AM in Green Building • (0) Comments