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.

“Select” grade Hickory yields stunning floor in Ontario

Posted by Christine Halvorson

A client of ours up in Ontario, Canada—Al Brouwer, president of Brouwer Construction—had these select grade Hickory floors installed in a new home he built up there. “Select grade” means that the boards were gone through again and again to get the most heart wood, which is the very center of the tree, included in each board. The heart wood ensures that each board contains the most dense and most beautiful vertical grain, and it will have maximum stability—it won’t cup or twist.

Then Mr. Brouwer took that select customization a bit further and he had us apply one or our handmade finishes to it. In this case he chose handscraped edges.

The floor boards are 6- to 10-inch wide and were finished on-site with Tung Oil. Mr. Brouwer wrote to report that the floors turned out to be the amber color he was seeking. He said at first he didn’t like the lustre—the level of shine—the floor ended up with, but once putting the furniture in place, the lustre toned down to a level he liked.

The process of choosing the wood for your floor, and then all the customizations that are possible with that particular wood, can seem overwhelmingly to folks when they first start thinking of installing wide plank floors in their home. We’ve tried to help each of our customers through the step-by-step process involved with a bit of an introduction here in We Make Buying Easy.

Posted on January 6, 2010 at 03:13 PM in Home Building & Contracting • (0) Comments
Hardwood Floors magazine features Carlisle’s Walnut in a spectacular rural Wisconsin retreat

Posted by Christine Halvorson

The December/January issue of Hardwood Floors (the magazine of the National Wood Flooring Association) features a whole lot of photos and a nice story about one of our customers and his labor of love building a retreat for his parents.

The new home was designed by Tom Jones, owner of Thomas R. Jones Design in Trabuco Canyon, California, for his parents, Ray and Janette, as their vacation home in the north woods of Wisconsin. Tom set out to design a retreat that capitalized on a long family history in that area of the country and on Tom’s own childhood memories and the family’s commitment to ecology and the study of the natural world.

The new retreat is in the deep woods of Wisconsin, just south of Lake Superior, where Tom spent special times while visiting the area from his childhood home in southern California. The Jones family had deep ties to the territory, just south of Lake Superior, and Tom set out to capture them all in one way or another in his design.

The home’s interior is all about stone and wood—and the wood on the floors is Carlisle’s own wide plank Walnut. The overall shape of the home calls to mind the big barns of Wisconsin’s farmland, with the wide plank floors of the interior enhancing that effect.

Here’s what designer and loyal son Tom had to say about the Walnut floor: “It has a rustic feel, but not too much. We really like the dark color of the walnut as well. It sort of grounded the space.”

Tom and his father had Terry Nelson, owner of Terry’s Installation Service in Hayward, Wisconsin, install the Carlisle floor. Nelson commented that he doesn’t see a lot of homes with walnut used for the main boards of the floor. Usually it’s ash, oak, maple or hickory, while walnut is often used as an accent in strips and borders.

“It’s not every day that you walk in around here and see—especially in wideplank—a walnut floor,” he says.

Nelson used a blind-nailing technique to attach the floor boards to a subfloor above radiant heating. He also used a urethane-based construction adhesive during installation. “The adhesive helps hold the wood flat—keeps it from cupping,” he said in this article. “If it does move, it helps it come back to where it’s supposed to be.”

You can read a lot more about this beautiful retreat and its construction by clicking through to the article itself here, in PDF format. It features some fabulous photography from Hardwood Floors.

Hardwood_Floors_Magazine_Article.pdf

See many more beautiful photos of this home at this company website of son Tom Jones.

As you can see, Carlisle floors presented no problem above radiant heat systems. Read more about the benefits of radiant heat.

Many more examples of using Walnut in various rooms can be seen here.

Posted on December 29, 2009 at 12:55 PM in Hardwood Flooring • Home Building & Contracting • (0) Comments
Will your remodeling investment pay off?

Posted by Christine Halvorson

According to Remodeling Magazine’s 2009-10 Cost vs. Value Report, a major kitchen remodel costs $57,215 with 72 percent of those costs recouped in a sale of the home. Of course, the recoup numbers are down significantly from just a few years ago because of the current economic crisis and the ongoing credit crunch. So, it’s probably a scary time to think about remodeling your home. Real estate conditions vary widely throughout the country and even within very narrow local markets. But, one of the things we like to point out to people about installing a Carlisle floor as part of a remodeling project is that the floor “pays back” in several ways.

A Carlisle Wide Plank Floor can improve the home’s beauty and increase its value at the same time. Because a Carlisle floor is made from the heart of a 100-year-old (or older) tree, it will last for generations, which generally can’t be said about any other flooring product. Carlisle wood is selectively harvested from well-managed forests or, as in the case of our 100 percent post-consumer reclaimed antique wood, is recycled from an old barn or mill. The initial investment in a Carlisle floor more than pays for itself over the years given its durability and dollars saved on maintenance. Unique methods of fine milling and periodic finishing with Tung Oil make these floors virtually maintenance free.

Remodeling is pretty much how Carlisle got started in this business in the first place. In our neck of the woods in New Hamphisre, people wanted to add rooms onto historic homes—some dating back to Colonial times—and wanted the flooring to match. We fulfilled that need, and then some.

If a remodeling project is in your future, yes, today’s economic conditions are scary, but you just might add a little bit of “insurance” to your future resale with the addition of a Carlisle floor.

Posted on December 24, 2009 at 12:56 PM in DIY • Home Building & Contracting • (0) Comments
Carlisle partners with Crown Point Cabinetry again

Posted by Christine Halvorson

Carlisle partners with Crown Point Cabinetry, based in Claremont, New Hampshire—which is not too far from our Stoddard, New Hampshire headquarters. We often provide Crown Point with reclaimed wood for them to make into customized cabinets, and you’ll often see our floors under Crown Point cabinets when they are being shown at trade shows and such.

We wanted to share a few photos with you from a recent photo shoot for Crown Point Cabinets. Three different types of cabinets were used in this extensive remodeling project in Suffern, New York—and all of them are sitting upon Carlisle floors. The photos show the kitchen, the bar and a breakfast room, where Crown Point’s cabinets have been customized to have a look of a vintage sideboard. The kitchen cabinets are Quarter-sawn Oak, the bar features Mahogany and the breakfast room is done in Maple cabinets.

Christine Dunleavy, the designer from Crown Point, was the one responsible for meeting the customer’s specifications in this extensive project. It all looks great and we think the floors are the perfect complement, don’t you?

Read about our other partnerships here.

Posted on December 15, 2009 at 01:52 PM in Home Building & Contracting • Restoration Projects • (0) Comments
Even the delivery gets praise with Carlisle’s custom hardwood floors

Posted by Christine Halvorson

We always like to provide great customer service at every step of the process when people buy our custom hardwood floors, but we rarely get praise just for the delivery method we use!

Carolyn and Scott MacGlashan of Maryland were a little anxious about a tractor trailer delivery of their new floor, our unfinished Hickory.

Adam Whitney, who is our guy in Carlisle’s Washington, D.C. showroom, assured them that the delivery would be just fine and, indeed, it was stellar, as the photos attest.

The MacGlashans wrote Adam that our “selection of Con-way Freight as their delivery agent was a most enjoyable experience. The driver, Mr. Troy Carls, is to be commended, to include his most friendly manner, and pride of creating a satisfied customer.”

And they like what they see so far, saying they are “especially pleased with the grade, various width boards, and especially the majority of long board lengths” that came in the delivery. The next step is installation.

We look forward to their report — and their pictures — when they’re done.

Posted on December 7, 2009 at 10:29 AM in Customer Stories • Home Building & Contracting • (0) Comments