WFB went through its archives and realized some of the amazing craftsmanship of past Floor of the Year winners belonged on the internet, and WFB Throwback was born. The following article originally appeared in the August/September 1993 issue of WFB (then called Hardwood Floors):
Floor of the Year, Commercial Category: C&M Wood Flooring Inc. | Deerfield Beach, Fla.
This year’s number-one commercial entry is not only a beautiful floor to look at, but also a testament to cooperation—from its designer, manufacturer, distributor and installer, who all had a hand in bringing the floor’s many elements together into a unified final product.
The room it sits in is the Boca Logo store, a lobby shop filled with merchandise bearing the logo of the hotel in which it is located, the Boca Raton Hotel & Club. The hotel’s logo, in fact, appears as an element of the floor—the green-on-white design that’s laser-cut into the white, 6-by-6-inch squares of marble appearing at intervals in the floor’s border.
If those small accents speak to the floor’s purpose, it’s the wood that gives it its enduring warmth. The brass strips and green and white marble pieces that make up the borders are wrapped in rosewood and accented by Brazilian cherry triangles, and the 9-foot-square patterned interiors and strip field are both of Brazilian cherry.
C&M’s Mike Faber reports that many hands helped shape the 1,500-square-foot, L-shaped floor before his company got down to the business of installing it.
“Pavlick Design in Ft. Lauderdale came up with the original idea, and then Design Flooring Distributors and Kentucky Wood Floors made it all workable,” Faber says, adding that such a process is often unavoidable on the more intricate jobs. “Sometimes the designer will come up with something that looks great on paper but isn’t totally workable. In this case, the manufacturer and distributor refined it.”
The work schedule was, in typical commercial fashion, extremely tight. Faber’s crew—13 in all—spent a long weekend (Friday through Sunday) installing it, and then a week sanding, staining and finishing it after all the other tradespeople were out of the way. A smaller crew of four completed the job after the finish was dry by putting in the marble pieces.
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That aspect of the job was fairly complicated, involving first installing pieces of 1⁄4-inch-thick pine in the spaces where the marble was to go, then later scraping away at the material to make certain the marble would lay flush with the finished floor. Each marble piece was then glued to the pine with a two-part epoxy.
“It really took some time,” Faber says. “It was hard to get into the smaller spaces with a scraper.”
The border and the pattern within it were both pre-assembled in small sections, but “there was a lot of improvising,” Faber says.
“It didn’t all come in exact,” he goes on. “We had to take some of that stuff apart. The marble was precut and mitered, but we had to cut the marble with a wet-saw where it hit the corner blocks. Some of the brass inlays came out when they heated up during sanding, and so we had to dig a deeper groove with a router. The whole thing really wasn’t as simple as it looks.”
Faber, who purchased the 55-year-old company in 1980, says that in keeping with his preferences the company does primarily (about 70 percent) residential work.
“Commercial jobs can be a headache because of the schedules they give you,” he says. “Even with this job—they were spending a fortune for that floor and for a first-class job, but they wanted it all done in three days. It was a little hectic—there were people stepping over each other—but it was productive.”
Now that he’s won a Floor of the Year Award, Faber’s got his eye on doing more floors that mix wood with stone and other elements.
“We enjoy them, and we want to do them,” Faber says. “It’s always nice when there’s something challenging to do. You feel a lot of pride when you’re done with something like this.”
Suppliers:
Abrasives: 3M | Adhesives: Titebond | Buffers: American Sanders | Flooring: Kentucky Wood Floors | Finish: Bona, DuraSeal | Nails/Nailing Machines: Powernail | Stain: DuraSeal | Sanders: Hummel
