When Phil Waine learned his friend, Mick Priestly, was going to salvage some timber from an abandoned 1850s cottage, Waine saw a chance to help preserve some local history and asked to tag along.
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When Phil Waine learned his friend, Mick Priestly, was going to salvage some timber from an abandoned 1850s cottage, Waine saw a chance to help preserve some local history and asked to tag along.
When he arrived at the dilapidated structure outside of Gunning, New South Wales, Australia, and saw what there was to work with, it was “serendipity.”
“I talked Mick into saving the flooring, too,” says Waine, who operates Phil’s Timber Flooring in Dalton, New South Wales. “His home is based around a structure of similar vintage. There was exactly the right amount salvaged to use in his place … The boards wanted to be there. The house wanted the boards!”
The fact that the old boards remained intact at all seemed fortuitous—the structure had long been abandoned, and a collapsed wall and blown-off roof partially exposed the floor to the elements. But the native wood species, red stringybark, knows a thing or two about surviving in rural Australia.
“It has a really unique color and grain pattern,” Waine says of the wood. “Very localized to our area and used a lot in old shearing sheds. Beautiful timber. It gets harder as it gets older!”
The board thicknesses ranged from 0.9 inch to 1.1 inch throughout the structure, which Waine suspects was used to house farm workers in its heyday.
“The boards were nailed down but had been exposed to a bit of weather, so they only needed minimal persuasion to get them out,” he says.
They found several bottles, broken crockery and old newspapers during the demo of the building—but nothing was quite as startling as the entire dog skeleton they came face-to-face with.
“That was a bit mad!” Waine says. “I’d like to think that it was an old dog that found a comfortable place to pass.” Priestly’s own dog, Megs, took a moment to lay down next to the skeleton for a disconcerting photo op. (“That wasn’t staged. Some find the photo disturbing, but I think it’s really cool,” Waine says.)
They managed to salvage around 300 square feet of flooring from the building, along with its historic slab walls.
After de-nailing all the boards, Waine cut all of the badly damaged timber out of the boards using a miter saw. “The boards were obviously pretty dirty and rough, so I used older, many-times-resharpened blades,” he says. He then took the boards to a wood guild in a nearby town and ran them through a planer to make them all 0.9-inch thicknesses. He chose not to touch the widths of the boards, which varied between 5 and 6 inches.
“I didn’t want to rip to uniform width, as it would have killed the vibe,” he explains.
Waine installed the boards over a structural-grade particle board at Priestly’s house using adhesive and nails.
“I was concerned about getting glue squeezing up through nail holes and between the butt-edged boards, so I applied liberally but selectively to the underside of each board with a sausage gun,” Waine says. He blind-nailed “with big swings” to get the boards as tight as possible.
“The hardest part was trying to keep everything reasonably straight given the variance in the widths,” he says. “There was a lot of dry-fitting and shuffling to make it work. I also had very little waste allowance, so the planning and setup was critical.”
Waine sanded carefully with a rotary sander in order to maintain the inconsistencies in the aged wood, then applied three coats of matte hardwax oil finish.
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He looks back at the job as one of the most satisfying of his career.
“I have massive respect for the timber-men of old,” he says. “For their hard work, ingenuity and skills. I love old timber, and I really love old floor boards … These boards were destined for the fire; being given the opportunity to give them another life feels wonderful.”
Having them installed in a friend’s home was an added perk, as well, he says: “I get to see my baby frequently when I drop in for a beer!”
Suppliers:
Adhesive: Soudal | Finish: Bona | Rotary sander: Canterbury Floor Sanders | Saws: Festool
