How-To: Calculating a Five-Tier Border With French Knots, Part 1

Keith Long Headshot
1 27 French Knot Closeup Pic1

Hidey-ho, Keith Long here with Thunderheart Flooring to continue going through the white oak and cabreuva (santos mahogany) floor that we recently completed in Fort Collins, Colo.

In my post last week we talked turkey on qualities of the varying grades of wood, mindset, quality of tools, some of my insights on pricing structure, and which type of client I choose to work with these days. We got up to speed on how to run the field on an angle and install a double picture frame border. Let’s up the ante a bit, and go through the specifics of how to arrive at the figures to install this five-tier border with French knot corners.

1 27 French Knot Closeup Pic1I’m a straightforward kind of a guy. Let me shoot straight and let you know, in plain English, why I’m posting this sort of specific information on these blogs. I feel fortunate to have had ample opportunity to succeed in life. Although I haven’t always seized each chance as it has come along, these days I have gotten better at recognizing opportunity when it presents itself. I am constantly taking steps a little past the outer edge of my current skill sets in attempts to become better at my craft.

I post to meet you up-and-coming technicians where you are at with your skillsets, mindsets, tool sets, customer relation skills, preparation for retirement, et cetera—and to shed light (via photos and words) on what may lie beyond your current comfort zone. I don’t want to blow you out of the water with the most tricky stuff I have ever done right up front. I want to lay the foundation with you first, then the cornerstone, then build up from there.

I want to make it as easy as possible for you to succeed. When I have had access to quality information, and as a result have felt confident enough to take the necessary steps to make my comfort zone larger, my life has transformed in positive ways. If you went through any of these posts and gained the confidence to say, “Oh, so that’s how it’s done. Well, I could do that. Correction–I will do that!”, I feel as if posting this information is well worth it.

Let’s break this border down to its simplest forms:

1 27 Border Specifics Pic2The field of this floor is 5-inch #2 white oak laid on a 45-degree angle. From a visual standpoint, I felt running the full 5-inch-wide white oak material for a couple rows on the border would have looked too wide, and the border would have potentially overpowered the field. For that reason I opted to rip the first two rows of white oak for the border down from 5 inches to 4 inches, which I found to be more proportional and pleasing to the eye.

While installing raw, unfinished wood straight wall to wall, I usually only need to order around 3 percent extra for waste due to end cuts and rips. Since this floor is a #2 grade white oak, and I would have some excess waste due to the field being run wild into where the border would go, I brought 10 percent extra for waste, and ended up with just a handful of 5-inch boards left to pack out under one arm at the end of the project.

As I installed the field, boards that had problem areas on either the left or the right could be installed on the start or end of the row, with the questionable parts being placed beyond the line I had snapped where the field would end and the border begin. When the border was cut off, these questionable areas were part of the waste, while the rest of the board was still of benefit.

When I asked the homeowners if they were satisfied with the flooring that had been in for seven years, they said yes. The wife mentioned that, in a perfect world, she would have liked for the Brazilian cherry bordering to have patinaed more uniformly than it had. Some of the boards had stayed about the same color, while others had become deep red. I mentioned that santos mahogany, although being a different species of wood, is close to the color of Brazilian cherry, and is more uniform in color. They decided to use santos mahogany for the bordering for this addition.

Through trying different widths of material, I decided that the santos mahogany would look best if it were 1.25 inches wide. I brought around 60 square feet (approximately 5.5 square meters) of 3-inch wide clear-grade santos mahogany from my shop to acclimate. Although I didn’t need that much material, I opted to bring more than enough so I could pick out the boards that most closely resembled each other from a color and grain standpoint while looking pleasing to the eye being adjacent to the jatoba (Brazilian cherry) that had been installed seven years ago.

Visually, I feel a wider board around the perimeter is a good move. I opted to keep the white oak a full 5 inches wide for the final picture frame around the perimeter. A small amount of this perimeter row is covered by baseboard, making this row just a fraction of an inch wider than the other two 4-inch rows of white oak going around the border.

1 27 French Knot Specifics Pic3If a person has an image to go by and knows what widths of material they would like to use for the border, figuring out the dimensions of each piece of the French knot is a matter of calculation. For the upright three pieces of santos mahogany that are the same dimension, we know the stock is 1.25 inches wide. They are one 4-inch border plus one 1.25-inch border long, which totals 5.25 inches.

The 2.75-by-2.75-inch block of white oak in the bottom right of the French knot is what would have been a 4-by-4-inch block, with 1.25 inches of santos mahogany off of each side. The dimensions of each piece of the French knot can be figured based on its relationship to the dimensions of the border. I have found this holds true for any linear pattern in hardwood flooring–if the width of the stock and image are known, the dimensions of all pieces can be calculated.

For the total width of the border, there are two rows of 4-inch white oak, two rows of 1.25-inch santos mahogany, and one row of 5-inch white oak, totaling 15.5 inches from the field of the floor to the wall. Add in whatever width you need for expansion space in your area, and that will be how far to measure out from the wall to cut off the field and start installing the border. In this part of Colorado, since the relative humidity and temperature don’t vary much inside the living space of this home, even 5-inch-wide plainsawn white oak doesn’t move hardly at all. I had 5/16-inch-wide baseboards to install back over the floor and no shoe molding (base shoe), so I fit the border pretty close to the wall.

I imagine one more post next week ought to get us all wrapped up on this flooring project. I’ll go through how I laid out the boards to make the border flow visually, and in what order I installed the border in relation to the French knots.

On my blog post a couple weeks ago, I made an offer to mail a copy of the book “The Richest Man In Babylon” to whichever hardwood flooring contractor replied in the comments that lived closest to Uncle Edy’s Ice Cream in Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia, by January 23. Andrew Sherriff from Narre Warren North, Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, is the closest that posted, at 1,923 kilometers from Alice Springs. Congratulations, Andrew!

Am hoping this promotion has brought awareness to the book. Any of us can track it down, and I’ve seen new copies being offered for sale for anywhere from $10–$13 dollars—in my opinion, an unbelievable value for the insights and positive impact it can have on a person’s life that wants to succeed financially.

Stay sharp, see you next week!

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