Milling a new kitchen floor 

We thought about doing a linoleum floor, but the cost of real linoleum is pretty high. Vinyl is TEH SUXXOR, and the floor of our kitchen is way too out of level to do tile. So why not a wood floor?  Buying a pre-made wood floor was out of the question due to floor levelness. One manufacturer's site I checked said that the floor can be no greater than 3/16" out of level over 10 feet. Ours is 1 1/2" out of level over 7 feet.

 The rest of our house has hardwood flooring, but not the 3/4" tongue-and-groove flooring commonly used today. It has, in fact, 5/16" thick strips of oak, either 7/8" wide or 1.5" wide (1st floor and 2nd foor, respectively), square-edged and face nailed. Makes sense....wood that thin/narrow is pretty flexible, and can be bent to accomodate uneven flooring. So why not do that in the kitchen to give us a wood floor that matches (in basic style) the rest of the flooring?

I chose to use white ash for a few reasons. First, it's dirt cheap these days (thanks to a disease that's killing lots of white ash here in the Northeast), it's known for its flexibility, and it's a durable hardwood known for its bendability. The local lumber yard had 5/4 ash S2S (that's 1 1/16" thick boards planed smooth on the top and bottom) for $2.88/bf. Nice! That's about half the cost of hard maple.

 

After a day and a half of work, the numerous boards that were previously 1 1/6" thick x 7" wide x 4-6 feet long have been ripped into numerous strips for the floor. About 320 rip cuts on the tablesaw were needed to do this (that's about 1600 feet worth of ripping).

The best part of making the flooring in this way can be seen in the following picture:

 

 

 See the growth rings in the flooring? Their vertical nature indicates that the floor is made of quartersawn lumber, which is both very dimensionally stable, as well as being pretty uniform in appearance (as compared to flatsawn lumber). I'm quite pleased with how this is turning out. I still have to square up the ends and cut out what few knots in the lumber there were, but I'm ahead of schedule on this phase of the project.

 

4/19 update: spent the weekend squaring up the ends. The flooring is ready to be installed!