Titus Ragalie of Tualatin, Ore.-based Treadline Construction took full advantage of the opportunity to install anything he wanted in a client’s home office. The 23-year-old was given free rein for the 11-by-11-foot space and saw it as a chance to do something unique. “I was lucky enough to where they gave me full creative freedom to do whatever I wanted there,” Ragalie says.
It started when he was looking for a chance to incorporate curved wood in a flooring project. “I’ve been fascinated with the idea that you can bend the wood,” he says. Once the opportunity and the design inspiration popped up (he referenced Yggdrasil, the sacred tree from Norse mythology with entwined branches and roots), Ragalie began to sketch. “I just started drawing stuff on graph paper, and that was kind of my first draft. There were design changes along the way. There was a fair amount of the floor that just kind of got figured out that day. You can’t plan for everything with this kind of thing,” he says.
To achieve the striped look he wanted, Ragalie needed to laminate the pieces of white oak, Douglas fir and walnut with glue, which meant he couldn’t use the traditional steam-box method of bending wood. “If I tried to steam them, then try to glue them together right after, the glue wouldn’t stick and they’d fall apart,” he explains.
Ragalie experimented with the bending process in his shop. He first tried bending glued ½-inch strips with hydraulic rams and clamps to hold them in place, but soon found that they needed to be narrower. “I had a ton of failures with snapping. Or I’d get them to bend and then I’d leave them in the shop and come back and they would’ve exploded in the middle of the night,” he says.
He then switched to 3/16-inch strips and bent only three or four pieces at a time. “When I initially started to glue these, I was thinking I would do one or two species of wood at a time, so like 20 to 30 strips,” he says. “The problem was that it was so much force I ended up blowing up some of the hydraulic rams. They were rated at 8,000 pounds [of force].”
Ragalie soon found that he needed to decrease the width and number of strips he was bending at once.
On site, Ragalie made 3¼-inch white oak panels, then hand-cut them and sanded them to fit with the curves. Both the curves and panels were glued down, while the edges were guide-ripped and finished with a walnut feature strip and a 3¼-inch white oak log cabin border.
Ragalie made 3¼-inch white oak panels on site then hand-cut them and sanded them to fit with the curves.
Through trial and error and roughly 160 hours of work, Ragalie ended up with a floor that made him proud and the client happy. “I’m already thinking about doing it again. I’d like to do a 1,000-square-foot room,” he says.
Ragalie's curved wood floor took roughly 160 hours in all.
SUPPLIERS: Abrasives: LobaSand | Adhesive: Wakol | Buffer, Edger: American Sanders | Filler: Woodwise | Finish: Absco Swedish Finish | Moisture barrier: Fortifiber Aquabar | Moisture meter: Lignomat | Nailer: Primatech | Sander (Big machine): Lägler Hummel, Trio | Sander (Palm): Ekasand | Saws: DeWalt table saw, chop saw, Milwaukee circular saw | Underlayment: LP Building Solutions | Wood flooring: Hardwood Industrie
