Decking

The floors in this house use 2x6 tongue and groove pine boards from eastern Europe, instead of the usual plywood subfloor and hardwood flooring. The T&G boards become the ceiling for the floor below. This simplifies construction in some ways, but it also requires some care in choosing boards that will look good where they are visible. For the first floor, we tried to choose boards that were damaged or dirty on the bottom side, because that side will only be seen in the basement.

It took us about 3.5 days to complete the decking for the first floor of the two story section.

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The most difficult bits were (1) getting the rows started, because we had to work from ladders at first, and (2) ripping boards to fit at the junction between the one story and two story sections. The two sections ended up not being quite level with each other by about 1/8 of an inch in some places, but we should be able to sand or shim to deal with this transition. It would have taken much longer to have built the sections to be perfectly level, and even then the settling of the wood might have changed things after we were done. This is an example of the rule that perfection is the enemy of good enough.

In the picture (see link above) you can see a tool called a BoWrench that came with the lumber from FirstDay. This device allows you to press the board you are nailing flush against the previous board. It works very well but it also leaves indentations on the beams if you use a lot of force. This won’t matter with beams that will only be seen from the basement, but we’ll have to be much more careful with the upstairs beams. We may have to resort to using pipe clamps instead.