Surface Blog

“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 Jan 06, 2010 AT 04:43 AM in Home Building & Contracting • (2) Comments

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 Jan 05, 2010 AT 06:34 AM in Green Building • (2) 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 Jan 03, 2010 AT 09:30 PM in Green Building • (0) Comments

Carlisle’s foot-worn distressed Walnut wide planks goes sky high in Chicago’s Hancock Tower

• Posted by
• Christine Halvorson

Our Sales and Design consultant Gary Ryer sent along this photo as a kind of “sneak peak” into an upcoming magazine spread that will include this above-the-clouds flooring project. We’re talking the 92nd floor of Chicago’s Hancock Tower.

It may be our wide plank Walnut that already has a lot of old-world character to it, but this apartment still manages to pull off a pretty swank metro feel to it, don’t you think? (That’s not surprising to us, but we get a lot of questions about putting wood floors in modern buildings.)

The floor shown here is an 8-inch, select grade Walnut, that has been “distressed” with a foot-worn feel. The boards were then finished with a clear matte finish that was applied after installation.
We’re pretty excited about the project and, apparently, so was the owner—he’s already ordered another 3,000 square feet for a couple more units he bought next door to this one!

Here’s another example of a footworn Walnut, using a fancy tile inlay technique and more about the footworn distressed style.

And another way you can see how the traditional and the modern can blend pretty well in a variety of settings.

Posted on Dec 29, 2009 AT 01:31 PM in Hardwood Flooring • (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.

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

Posted on Dec 29, 2009 AT 02:25 AM in Hardwood Flooring • Home Building & Contracting • (0) Comments