Making Our Own Wood Flooring..

YES...you read right...

YES...we are crazy!....haha

It all started when we went shopping around for walnut hardwood flooring.

The ones we liked were super expensive AND you don't

even get a nice layer of the actual hardwood!

So after debating with ourselves about whether or not we should tackle such a

 thing, we decided that doing it for ourselves and our home would be worth it.

~and~

If we ever truly get sick of making it we can go ahead and buy some.

We've decided to take it slowly -room by room-

First room on the list was the laundry room.

We thought this would be a great starting place because it's small and

we could dabble in a few things like cabinetry, flooring, plumbing etc..

so as to better prepare ourselves for when we decide to take on the kitchen.

I always draw out what I'm thinking for a room or a piece of furniture

so that Sher can get a better understanding of what's going on in my head.

Then, we will talk it out, tweak it and he will design a technical version in 

Google Sketchup and then we start building (in real life- lol) from there.

Building in sketchup is pretty cool because you can make all of your mistakes there,

and all the real measurements are there in the design so the cutting list is easy to print out.

So..here is the drawing I made of what I was looking to do with the Laundry Room:

It's not perfect at all..I forgot to draw in the crown moulding and kick space

under the cabinets etc. ...oops..hehe

BUT, it gives Sher an idea of what I'm talking about!

I'll post more pics of the Laundry Room in the next post,

and now I'll show you the process of us two crazy people

making our own hardwood flooring.

First we started by picking a 1 3/4" thick x 10" wide x 8 feet long walnut board at the lumber yard.

Then we cut it down to roughly 30" pieces,then using the bandsaw we resawed the board into

thin pieces:

 I don't have a pic of the sawing at the bandsaw because we are both involved during

 that process so there are no free hands for picture taking.

Sher then cuts down some baltic birch plywood sheets to fit the strips of walnut.

Baltic birch plywood is AWESOME..comes from Russia -it's super

straight and has a lot of nice uniform plys..it's not all junky and full of holes or spaces like

the plywood they sell and lowes or home depot.

We then glue the walnut veneers to the baltic birch,  and clamp them up to dry.

Here they are out of the clamps.

After they are nice and dry we run them through the planer to

make them all uniformly thick and to take away the re-saw markings.

(We so need a new planer -this little guy can't handle all the flooring anymore LOL)

After planing all of the boards, it's time to make the tongue and grooves at the table saw.

This is how the floor will snap together.

This takes a while because you have to make all the grooves on 2 sides of the planks,

and then switch blades and make all the tongues on the other 2 sides.

My job here is to check the flushness of the boards and to stack them up as 

Sher saws them..so I'm able to take pics hehe.

Once all of that is finally done, they get a sanding and then we lay

them all out to receive their 3 coats of poly.

Here are just a few of the boards waiting to get all pretty in oil based polyurethane.

The wood just wakes up and gets so beautiful when you apply the finish,

we decided to just clear coat and no stain.

So that's it!..Sounds simple enough but it sure does take a long time to get through all the steps.

Soon we'll show you what the finished floor and laundry room came out like!