From fir to (fir) flooring

A wood journey

I’ve got cabin on the brain and we recently installed the floor boards, so I thought I’d share the journey of that wood.

It started as that tree. The one proudly standing tall over the center of the dojo. A Douglas fir.

The wildfire that came through several years back killed it. Didn’t consume it, mind you, just killed it. That happened with a lot of trees, and over the years they’d fall over every time a storm hit.

The fir was constantly shedding widow makers, and we didn’t want to wait for it to flatten a car, so I cut it down with the intention of milling a bunch of it.

We milled it with an Alaskan chainsaw mill. I kind of suspected we might build a small cabin at some point, and that this might make for some flooring, but I wasn’t positive, so we sliced it up into 1 1/2” boards. I figured if the flooring didn’t happen, the wood would be thick enough to have other applications.

The boards were stacked and left to dry for about a year.

Once the cabin build was underway and the wood was destined to be (unnecessarily thick) floorboards, we cut them into 6-inch wide planks, two at a time, with a beam saw. My buddy Jon came into town for the job—fitting, as he also did much of the milling on this tree.

The stack of 6-inch planks sat for another few months while the rest of the cabin came together, but once it was time to install flooring we unpacked the stack and sent them through the planer.

I’d considered routing a tongue and groove onto the boards, so that we could blind screw through the tongue and hide fasteners, but ultimately decided against it. The boards would likely cup a bit over time and my buddy Tom advocated to suck it up and screw through the face. We did put a router to use on them though—to put a slight chamfer on the edges of all the boards.

While screwing down the boards we used clamps to ensure a tight fit. Chalk lines and guides kept the countersunk screw holes in a straight line and consistently spaced.

We filled the screw holes with Famowood wood filler. Once that dried, we sanded down the filler to—finally, after over a year of processing—reveal the finished surface of the floor.