Joshua Crossman
If you're in the foggy Pacific Northwest and want an unobscured view of the stars, visit Joshua Crossman's home and look down. Crossman, the owner of Yelm, Wash.-based PTL Hardwood Floors, installed a wood floor featuring the night sky and six major constellations in his children's playroom.
"I love stars and constellations," Crossman, who still remembers the report on Canis Major he did in eighth grade, says. "It came to me one day to do it in the floor."
First he created the universe—300 square feet of riftsawn, 3-inch-wide white oak. Then he made the stars. Instead of simply painting white circles on the floor, he created dozens of small wooden plugs in various sizes out of maple. He drilled a hole in the middle of the floor and placed the first plug for the North Star. Next he placed the first constellation, the Big Dipper. Five more constellations were placed, as well as a number of solitary stars.
Crossman then took a paint brush and applied water-based finish on the plugs so when he colored the floor, the plugs wouldn't take the stain. The first stain—a custom blue—went down in a 14-foot-diameter circle around the stars. He wiped the stain off each plug with a wet towel. Crossman stained the rest of the floor jet black, then finished the entire floor with a two-component water-based product.
He says the finish is holding up well to his kids' abuse, and he gets a lot of floor pros looking at the project on his website. Crossman's happy with it, but he's also thinking about adding new stars in the future. The universe, whether above our heads or below our feet, is always expanding.
