“I kind of wanted it to look like a stack of wood fell over, and then maybe someone walked across and kicked a piece,” says Danbury, Conn.-based Meteorite Design House Owner Frank Horrigan. He’s not describing the grungy set of a fight scene in The Fast and the Furious, but rather the vision behind this mixed-species homage to disarray.
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“I kind of wanted it to look like a stack of wood fell over, and then maybe someone walked across and kicked a piece,” says Danbury, Conn.-based Meteorite Design House Owner Frank Horrigan. He’s not describing the grungy set of a fight scene in The Fast and the Furious, but rather the vision behind this mixed-species homage to disarray.
But as disorderly as the flooring design seems, it took a considerable amount of organizing to accomplish. A friend of Horrigan’s in Maine had gotten a deal on long-length ash flooring and asked Horrigan to come up with something unique. Horrigan obliged, cooking up a design for a 450-square-foot room that incorporated walnut, red oak and white oak boards he had left over from another project.
Horrigan began by nailing down the “random” boards that appear strewn about the floor, using a mix of the red oak, white oak and walnut on the plywood subfloor. He then cut the ash and red oak that intersected the “fallen over” boards in the floor. The vertical boards had a repeating pattern of four rows of ash and one row of red oak.
"It got a little tricky making the cuts to weave it through the design,” Horrigan says. “But I loved doing it. It was a blast." When the flooring was nailed down, Horrigan sanded and stained it golden oak and applied five coats of finish.
“I was just trying to do something a little different, something a little less uniform,” Horrigan says. And unlike The Fast and the Furious, only one of these floors will be made.
“Nobody ever will have something like that floor from me again,” Horrigan adds. “The customers know that they’re getting a one-off original kind of thing. That makes me happy, too.”
See another of Horrigan's one-off wood floor designs by clicking here.
All Things Wood Floor, created by Wood Floor Business magazine, talks to interesting wood flooring pros to share knowledge, stories and tips on everything to do with wood flooring, from installation, sanding and finishing to business management.
