Greg Bettjeman had bought a home that needed work and he wanted a challenge—a mountain to climb. He found one in a wood floor project. He had built an extension on his New Zealand home and was about to glue down planks of native river-reclaimed macrocarpa and Hall's totara when he says he paused. "No, let's do something different," Bettjeman recalls thinking.
"Different" turned out to be unlike anything seen before. He cut the wood with a scroll saw into more than 500 freeform geometric shapes 1 inch thick and no greater than 2 feet in length. Swimming through the shapes is a family of what he refers to as nematodes, whose beady black eyes were made from ebony and spalted tawa. Bettjeman wanted to give the nematodes a place to go, so he inlaid a pond scene complete with the rippled reflections of a tree made from red beech and a moon of evergreen buckthorn.
The next step was to accentuate each piece with a heavy curve routed around the edges. To avoid burning the end grain with his router, Bettjeman made a contraption that shot two jets of water at the spinning router bit.
Finally, all the pieces were glued down and his partner ("She has the patience of a saint," Bettjeman says) went to work sanding each piece with a random orbital sander, moving from 150 grit to 400 grit. Then she finished the floor with tung oil.
A little more than a year after the project began, it was completed. "The mountain was climbed," Bettjeman says. "I looked at it and saw that it was good."
