Honor Award, Commercial Category: Olive & Olive Inc. | Woodstock, Ga.
Joe Olive, the “pop” of his self-described “mom-and-pop operation,” attributes the design of his Honor Award-winning floor to a corporate customer who, having second thoughts about the basic parquet they’d specified, asked Olive for his input.
“They were starting to talk about nicer flooring,” Olive says, “and that’s the point where I suggested the radial pattern. I also suggested jatoba because it’s good for commercial work—very hard and dense. They liked it and went with it.”
His design accomplished what the parquet couldn’t—a floor that responded more clearly to the room’s elliptical, 16-by-12-foot shape.
A 19th-floor rotunda that opens to the elevator lobby, a reception area and the conference room and other work stations, the space is part of the new offices of Balentine & Co., Atlanta-based investment counselors.
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With his wife, Martha, on maternity leave, Olive handled most of the installation with a helper. After putting down a plywood subfloor on top of the concrete, they laid down chalk lines for virtually every board position and worked from the center medallion—which Olive calls “nothing special”—outward.
“In the shop, we’d actually only laid out one quadrant of the floor,” says Olive. “On the site, we went ahead and laid out every board in the whole floor just to make sure we were staying on track. Then we installed all the tapered planks all the way around the octagon. After we laid the whole thing we cut into the center with a router and dropped the medallion in.”
The job went smoothly in spite of the tricky nature of radial cuts.
“Radial pieces are hard to make,” Olive says. “You have to make a 7-foot perfectly straight cut in a piece of wood that has a lot of stress in it. When you cut it, both pieces on either side of the cut tend to warp. To get around the stress problem, we marked the cut we were going to make on each plank, and made a straight-line rip on one side just outside the line and a straight-line rip on the other side just outside the line. Then we went back and cut on the lines. Making four straight-line rips took away the stress factor.”
After 14 years in business, the Olives’ company is still small—“I wouldn’t say that we do a lot of any type of job,” Olive says—but that’s just the way he likes it. By about seven years ago, the company “had built up a fairly large crew, and it got to the point where they were doing the work and I was doing the sales and the management,” says Olive. “I didn’t really enjoy that, so I shifted back to doing the work myself, and that’s also when Martha got involved. I’ve really learned a lot in the last seven years, working on some pretty nice jobs that are challenging to make. Like this one.”
Suppliers
Nails/Nailing Machines: Stanley-Bostitch | Adhesives: TEC Incorporated | Finish: Glitsa American Inc. | Abrasives: 3M Company | Sanders: Hummel (Floorco) | Buffers: Clarke Industries
