Wood Floor of the Week: Pennsylvania Supreme Court Rules in Favor of 3D Courtroom Floor

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12 11 Wfotw 412 11 Wfotw 512 11 Wfotw 6Supreme Courts are decisive about some of the most important issues in the country. But it can be a different story when it comes to deciding on a wood floor for the courtroom.

“They really didn’t know what they wanted,” Ron Doran of Pittsburgh-based Doran Hard Surfaces says of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. “They knew they wanted a hardwood floor, but they wanted something unique.”

Fortunately, the court’s designers tapped Doran to help deliver something out of the box. “They gave me a ton of freedom artistically to do whatever I wanted with it,” he says.

Doran pitched the idea of a 3D brick floor for the roughly 300-square-foot area behind the bench, matching the design of the courtroom paneling. With an enthusiastic greenlight, Doran ordered 100% quartersawn 9-by-18-inch white oak and 1½-inch plainsawn strips of American cherry and walnut to develop the bricks. He cut the cherry and walnut into picture frames off site, then transported the material to the Supreme Court building’s judges’ chambers, where he glued them to the white oak.

“Half of the rectangle picture frame is cherry, the other half is walnut,” Doran says. “And when you butt them up against each other, that’s what gives them the three-dimensional look.”

He spent a day and a half gluing all of the pieces together, a process he says was “tedious.”

It was also quiet, as the judges were away and Doran was the only one there most days. He was given his own security code and able to leave his equipment on site for his five days there, meaning he didn’t have to get the machines through security and lug them to the eighth floor of the historic courthouse each day.

Once the bricks were assembled, Doran and his son glued them down in less than a day. When it came time to sand, Doran opted not use a big machine on the floor.

“The hard part you run into when you’re sanding something like that is the cherry and the walnut are softer than the oak,” he says. “If I were to sand the whole thing with the belt sander, all the walnut and cherry would just divot a little bit.”

Instead, he gave the floor three cuts with his PowerDrive, using 60-, 80-, and 100-grit. Then Doran water-popped the floor and applied a light-brown stain. He added two coats of water-based satin finish before he adjourned.


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The final ruling was overwhelmingly in Doran’s favor. “Everyone was really excited by it,” he says. As for Doran, putting on the last coat of polyurethane was the biggest reward.

“We always look forward to the unique stuff that’s not just your normal straight lay,” he says. “That’s probably one of the most fun times I’ve had putting a floor together.”

Although it now exists in the highest court in the Keystone State, one small injustice about the awesome floor remains: “It’s only the area behind the bench,” Doran laughs. “So pretty much the only people going to see it are the judges.”

Suppliers:

Abrasives, Adhesive, Edger, Finish, Multi-disk sander, Stain: Bona | Buffer: American Sanders | Saws: Bosch | Distributor: Rossi Floor Technologies | Wood flooring: Allegheny Mountain Hardwood Flooring

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