how to recycle oak flooring

We floored the yurt with recycled oak flooring. We paid $800 dollars for 800 square feet of the stuff (its sells for $3-$5 / square foot, new), and since the yurt wasn’t ready for it, we lived in our old farmhouse with metal bound bundles of it filling our living room knee deep for about three months. I don’t recommend that, but it was too good a deal to pass up and we had nowhere else to put it. Ah, the silly life of recycled-house-builders.

I’ll show you how in a minute, but first, here is the yurt platform with the flooring put down. You can see the ragged edge around the circle that hasn’t been trimmed yet, and the finish is the old finish—nothing has been sanded yet. This stuff had already had the old nails removed, which was part of the appeal of the deal.

And here they are, sanding:

The crazy thing about yurt flooring is that you have to put it down before you put the yurt up because the yurt lattice will sit right on the floor—so you can’t finish it once the yurt is up (unless you’re willing to leave a strip unfinished around the edges). Once they started laying the stuff down, the race was on to get it finished and the yurt up, before the next rain. How do they do this part in Seattle, I wonder?

On the night before the yurt was to go up, they were projecting 30% chance of showers, so Paul rigged up the biggest tarp on the planet. Here he is, putting on another coat of finish before the big Yurt Raising.

Luckily, it did not rain a drop. Phew.

Here is what the floor looked like once it was sanded, and finished:

Absolutely beautiful.

There are lots of places to get used flooring. Craigslist is a good source of scrap from larger projects, though the quantities may be small. Sometimes you can get the extra that a person ordered that was never installed, extra boxes/bundles from a big job. Other time it might be used and you’ll have to take out the old nails. Either way, you can get some really nice flooring for incredibly cheap. Other options are to get the flooring that is being pulled up in a remodeling job—this is how we got our yurt floor. Another good source is used building supply stores—there is a big Habitat store near here that we use for a lot things. Of course, if you have to get flooring from several sources in order to get enough for your project, it’s better to go with unfinished stuff, because when you sand it down, it will all be the same anyway.

But back to the present. We—or rather, Paul—is putting flooring down in the little Noah House today. With the yurt, he had to finish the floor after it was put down, but this time he is using pre-finished stuff, mostly because he got a good deal on a used flooring gun off of craigslist that came with a load of the stuff. With recycled building, sometimes you have to take what’s available when you need it and make it work.

Here is the truck load of scraps from someone else’s floor. An advantage to building a tiny house is that the leftover scrap from some huge McMansion is enough to be valuable material at the tinier scale.

Here Paul is using a grinder to cut off the old nails. This goes pretty quickly, and puts off cool looking sparks. The kids love that part. Luc especially liked the job of gathering up the cut off nails with one of his dump trucks and driving them to the Nail Dump. With sound effects.

When you’re ready to lay the floor, you put tar paper down, then start putting in one strip at a time, using the flooring nail gun to fix it into place. The pictures below are from from the little 6×6 extension on the side of the Noah House. It would have been Noah’s bathroom, but I think we’ll make it into a Luc Room, with a fun-to-climb bunk bed sort of arrangement that Paul will build. A cool little boy space.

Okay, flooring guns. Basically, your options are to buy a new gun (expensive, and if you don’t have a huge job, a waste once you’re done, though reselling might be a good option), buy a used gun (might not work, no returns), rent a gun (time consuming to go get it and return it, and you have to get all the work done in one day as the cost for more than one day is often the same as the cost of a used gun), or hammer it in in by hand (takes a very long time, wearing on your muscles, not as finished a result, could be a good choice if the area is very small). Like I said, Paul opted to get a used gun—he’ll probably resell it and recoup most of the cost.

Here he is using it.

It’s a cool, very specialized tool, holding the flooring strip in place, lining up the nail, and driving it in when you hit the back of it with a mallet. It fires the nail in with a puff of air (the red hose is going to a compressor), so you don’t have to apply a lot of force (which is hard on your body, especially with a big floor). It’s very fast. Boom, boom, boom.

The advantage, obviously, with the pre-finished stuff, is that once you get it down, you’re done. And it’s pretty, as well offering a durable surface—good for a little boy’s room. If he was using regular flooring, once it was in place he would have to sand it (probably renting a sander) and then finish it with tung oil, or polyurethane, or whatever suited the situation. I actually like the way the regular flooring looks, better, as there is a beveled groove on the pre-finished that bothers me (instead of the pieces fitting flush with each other), and the finish looks a little fake. But for what we paid, and for what it’s being used for—and the fact that we got it with the gun—it’s a good choice for this space.

Here is the completed floor in that little room.

Pretty, huh? With a space this small, the whole thing only took a few hours. Happy flooring!