It seemed a daunting task: install wood flooring on an “irregular, uneven, wavy, sloping” concrete subfloor in the basement of the 274-year-old farmhouse with only 5 feet 10 inches of headroom.
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It seemed a daunting task: install wood flooring on an “irregular, uneven, wavy, sloping” concrete subfloor in the basement of the 274-year-old farmhouse with only 5 feet 10 inches of headroom.
But semi-retired wood floor pro Douglas Volk of Gwynedd Valley, Pa.-based Douglas A. Volk Builders Inc. had a vision for the wood flooring in the space, along with the craftsmanship to back it up.
The vision was that of an Argentinian wine bodega, and the site was his own historic farmhouse. The project had been on his “honey-do” list for longer than he could remember, he says. The wait may have been a benefit, however, giving Volk time to figure out solutions for the lengthy list of problems posed by the historic basement.
Because the unevenness couldn’t be corrected on the 100-year-old concrete, the first solution was to use block end-grain flooring with a thickness of 5/16-inch. “The size of the wood blocks would enable them to follow the contours of the existing concrete subfloor,” Volk says, “and the nature and variety of the end grain and the chamfered edges would visually soften the unevenness.” The thin pieces would also avoid greatly reducing the headroom in the basement.
For the end grain, Volk used Southern yellow pine, Douglas fir and Eastern hemlock salvaged from a centuries-old barn, spending at least 100 hours cutting all 1,340 pieces by hand using a chop saw. Once the pieces were cut, Volk sanded each one with a belt sander using 80-grit and 100-grit.
“The edges were hand-chamfered to achieve the look of the centuries-old end-grain wood block floors still in use in the Malbec wine bodegas in Mendoza, Argentina,” Volk says. Volk also cut aged butternut and black walnut end grain to create a decorative panel medallion near the entryway. For the border, he salvaged white oak from a gym floor at a summer day camp that was about to be torn down. To deal with moisture seepage issues in the basement, Volk also installed a drainage system.
When it finally came time to install the flooring, Volk used a waterproof adhesive, back-buttering each piece before embedding it into the mastic. The installation took 11 hours, after which Volk applied 11 coats of medium-sheen tung oil finish.
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“No staining was necessary; the fibers in the aged barn timbers literally sprang to life with varied and earthy wood tones as the tung oil soaked deep into the grain,” he says. The headroom of the basement ended up 5 feet and 9 5/8 inches; “cozy, but not claustrophobic,” Volk says.
The flooring was completed over a period of three years, and Volk says the resulting 144-square-foot wine cellar imparts a feeling of “total immersion into the experience” of wine tasting, reminiscent of the Argentinian wine bodega he and his wife had visited in 2012. And another nice thing about pulling off a challenging wood flooring project in your own wine cellar? There’ll always be something to toast to.
Suppliers:
Abrasives: Klingspor, 3M | Adhesive: Bostik | Finish: Waterlox | Moisture Meter: Wagner Meters | Palm Sander: Ryobi | Saws: DeWalt