Tiny House 2: Floor Boards
I spent a few hours yesterday and today installing floor boards. These are 2x6 tongue and groove pine boards that span the 40 inches between the floor beams. I nailed them to the beams with 6d box nails through the tongues. This way the nails are hidden from view. The smaller nails are necessary to keep the tongues from splitting.
A floor board is never perfectly straight or flat, so I used a ratchet strip to pull each one flush with the previous board, and occasionally had to clamp a warped board down to the beam to make it flat. Eventually, as the boards dry out more, small gaps will develop between them, so I try to eliminate all gaps during installation.
I mistakenly thought the boards were 5.5 inches wide, but it turns out their coverage is only 5 inches, so I ran out of boards today. The project will resume on Tuesday when some new boards arrive.
The 40 inch span is unusual, and most people who have never built a post and beam house will scoff and criticize when they see it. In my experience living in a house of this type for seven years, the span is never a problem. The floor is perhaps a little more bouncy than the typical super-rigid, super-hard floor found in most homes. But it’s plenty strong; I had my half-ton piano on one of these floors, and if it can handle that, it can handle anything.
Two advantages of a floor of this type:
It can be your final finished floor if you sand, then paint or polyurethane it. If you use polyurethane, the floor will have the natural beauty of the wood itself.
Water spills aren’t a problem; this happened to M. and me a couple of times. The water just trickles down through the spaces between the boards into the basement or whatever’s under them, instead of pooling and rotting the wood.
This is the fun part of the project. It’s easy to do and after a while you get a floor you can walk around on, imagining what it might be like when the house is finished.
The project gets much harder from now on. The next step is to build the post/rafter structures and raise them.