Medullary rays...

[Toby Newell]

Still working!

Who in their right mind dosen't like a few medullary rays?

1450 English oak, 'in the white' coated with wood hardener.

Not gping to need much staining

 

[Cassie]

I wish I had the house that this belongs to!

 

[Feltwell]

Lovely!

 

[Toby Newell]

I wish I had the house that this belongs to!

but not the restoration costs...

mind you, let's be totally honest, the client owns the house next door as well.!

It's a large three bedroomed cottage with garden and amazing 570yr old features including mostly intact hazel / willow stick wattle and daub and 12 - 14 inch wide pine and oak flooring, with some original doors and almost all original timber framework.

My 1984 built half size 2 bed box flat, with no garden and ZERO features in Friern Barnet cost 25% more at todays value carazy! Cheap as chips really.

Am continuously blown away how these things haven't all collapsed yet!

Outrageous amount of butchery over the centuries, plus damp, heave, subsidence, pest damage. Made from mortice, tennon and pegged green oak, hazel sticks, mud, straw, horse poo and lime and yet, wonky and unlikey as they are, they refuse to keel over!

Somehow I morphed from a French polisher into a mad type of joiner / carpenter / builder / conservator / finisher hybrid who takes on stuff anyone with a modicum of intelligwnce runs away from

 

[Toby Newell]

just image a dirty, grey, dusty trampoline with flaky bits with two sides over a foot lower than the other two on partially cut, loose legs and you pretty much have the idea

if it wasn't a late medieval trampoline one might want to throw it away.

but it will ok when it's finished, hopefully in the next week.

I mean, the customer can't really complain about the cost, I did tell him it's absolutely amazing and possibly some of the oldest pine flooring in the country, take a few photos, ply and carpet over the top and don't let it out to any really fat people.

 

[Lacan07]

I wouldn't carpet over those timbers!

Doing a grand job there Toby.

 

[Toby Newell]

well the previous occupants did! its nice to save them but only a job for a fan.

I like to think Im not a fan of anything, fan being short for fanatic, but I guess I must be a fan of beautiful and historic wood because only a total nut job would take this on.

all the wood is raw 'in the white' btw, the only colour is the wood hardener, so similar effect as oil varnish.

btw, double thumbs up for Rustins Wood Hardener, if can put up with weeks of off gassing! Seems to work very well.

I mean, easy is boring right?

And yes, in the first photo that is a foot long knot.

Anyone want to guess the height of a pine tree that has foot long knots and gives 14 inch span heart grain boards at branch height???

I'm not sure there are any such specimens alive currently in the UK.

 

[Lacan07]

just absolutely stunning

 

[Feltwell]

Beautiful work as ever Toby

 

[Cassie]

What an amazing job! Definitely one for love though-can’t be easy! You have an unholy amount of clamps-do they have their own shed??

 

[Toby Newell]

Yes. Yes. Yes. Not really. And no.

Actually I also have 1000mm and 1500mm clamps, band clamps, mitre clamps and original Marples joist clamps and sash clamps.

Still not enough clamps!

I don't think it's possible to ever have enough clamps.

It's a bit like garages and aheds. Oh that's big enough... a little while later... Oh, I need more space.

Well, ditto clamps.

I probably need another four dozen clamps, half for the engineering glueing, and half for the edge glueing, but you know, I would make even less money than I do as they cost from £20 to £50 each, well the large ones are up to £100.

 

[Cassie]

I bet the clamp shop loves seeing you
I’d settle for one decent shed. But then I’d fill it up and want another as you say!

 

[LadyArowana]

Lovely pictures of your beautiful work, thanks for sharing.

 

[Toby Newell]

lol my work isn't beautiful, the timber and property is.

 

[eezageeza]

Wow, you must be getting through industrial quantities of wood hardener! I'd never imagined it could be used like that (I thought it was just for stiffening wood as a base for filler).

Do you have to treat the whole floor, regardless of condition, in order to achieve a consistent finish? Do you apply conventional finishes on top of the hardener?

 

[Toby Newell]

Wow, you must be getting through industrial quantities of wood hardener! I'd never imagined it could be used like that (I thought it was just for stiffening wood as a base for filler).

Do you have to treat the whole floor, regardless of condition, in order to achieve a consistent finish? Do you apply conventional finishes on top of the hardener?

I think I used 2 litres, sorry, 4 litres! so about £100 worth, not a lot really, this is an extreme outlier case, a very rare 1450 floor in a condition almost all other contractors, even the uber expensive ones would throw away and replace with their own reclaimed boards. I have never tried to save such an old and damaged floor, it's really a test of what can be done.

You only need to apply it to the friable areas, ie worm galleries (in reality about 100% of almost every board then ) There is virtually zero wet or dry rot, at least. (You should see the oak beams! Like my Mum's Christmas pork and chestnut sausage rolls, literally, cream coloured and flaky sapwood on the outside, hack that off and a rock hard, brown heartgrain inside, ok, so harder than sausage, but the colour and flakiness are spot on)

Flaky pastry....


Sausage meat...


And yes, that is it's purpose, to stabilise the friable areas, to considate them before filling and final sanding.

I normally just fill with resin and sawdust but this doesn't penetrate as deep.

Sanding the filler without soaking with hardener might remove too much material, I have already sanded to remove the most delicate areas that would break off under normal use. I want to reduce any further loss.

It seems to work very well. It's basically a moisture curing solvent borne polyurethane wood finish, which is a very strong finish. Interestingly it is thicker than the wood finish, I thought it would be thinner to aid penetration, but it seems to soak in fine.

The wood hardener isn't meant to be a finish but can function as one. The floor will be filled several times with coloured sawdust and resin and two pack filler in the larger holes (and of course infilled with timber in many places) and will be sanded to remove the excess filler.

I'm not really concerned about aesthetics, it's all about conservation with this level of age and rarity. If the fine sanding removes the wood hardener as well as the filler, then fine, if it doesn't then that's fine too.

I am not going to purposefully sand off all the surface wood hardener. The colour is almost identical to shellac and luckily shellac goes on perfectly well to this finish so will blend in.

The filler and shellac will also soak in and help stabilise. The beauty of the floor is simply the fact that it is mostly orginal 1450 timber, crazily patched, wide, thick, irregular, damaged, worm eaten, that's the beauty, even when it was grey, dirty and flaky, it was still beautiful in that respect.

I siimply sanded to see where the fixings were, to reduce lifting damage, to clean the pores so the wood hardener could penetrate and the wood filler can fill and the shellac can adhere and to remove the friable areas that would crumble in use, it's all 100% functional sanding. Obviously I will intercoat hand sand to smooth the finish but that will remove 0% timber.

100% of the timber sanding is functional to aid in the preservation and repair. It is just a happy coincidence that it also exposes the bare wood, which looks more interesting than opaque black, grey and white, dirt and dust. Sometimes sanding can remove too much of the patination, not with woid of this age! The patination runs 100% through the board thickness.

The relaying is an utter nightmare!

 

[eezageeza]

Thanks Toby, very interesting. How long before we see photos of the finished floor ??

 

[Zebra]

Very interesting. My upstairs floor looks very much like this, wide pine boards, though I doubt it's as old as 1450, probably more like 1700, I don't know. I did ply and board over the top, as it was weak and wormy, and you said at the time (7-8 years ago perhaps) that you'd repaired worse, and that it was very old.

 

[Toby Newell]

I just finished a 1685, pine and oak before this. All depends upon the condition, this is extreme+++ it's a lot of work. You probably did the sensible thing boarding over. It can be done, of course, if the boards are thick enough not to break apart when lifted. The only reason I agreed to do it (after suggesting client boarded over) is because it looked so old. I have no idea if it is 570 years old, pine normally is reduced to dust by then, but my gut tells me it might be, 12 to 14 inch wide and 1.5 to 1.75 inch thickness might of been their saving grace. Can't be many pine floors in the world of this suspected age. It's nice to save one, not sure I could handle another Still I am developing a method to be able to do that if I fail to persuade a client (and myself) otherwise. I imagine it would be very rewarding to do it yourself, but probably take a client months to get there. I told the customer he should charge a museum fee to all those that enter.

There is an entire front room of 14 inch, chocolate brown, rock hard oak. I think I will need a long lie down in a dark room to consider my life choices.