Sometimes the answer to “Why?” is simply “Because we can.” First, here’s a time lapse video of the entire project.
Now that we’re caught up, some explanation:
All of the wood was odds and ends left over from previous jobs. A few feet of this, a few feet of that, slowly accumulated over the course of more than a year. Species include maple, American cherry, red oak, white oak, all in varying grades, and widths from 2-1/4″ to 6″. The inlay was made by an old coworker, never sold, and sat around for years slowly becoming very warped. It is made of maple, oak, walnut, and mahogany. It was going to be disposed of due to unusability before it was saved. This made the centerpiece for the small bedroom, which under ordinary circumstances wouldn’t warrant this type of excess.
The existing floor was very beat up fir, covered in wax and paint, which sat 3/4″ below the adjacent hallway, so we opted to simply install over the top of it. We laid out the large medallion in the main walkway where it wouldn’t be obscured by furniture, and traced around it. Then carefully mixing the wide assortment of wood by width and species, installed the floor roughly to the inside of the traced outline.
Because the inlay was hand made and irregular, there wasn’t an easy way to build a guide jig to cut the hole for it, so all the work needed to be done free hand. First the bulk of the material was cut out with a Fein Multimaster, which was able to cut out all but the last 1/8″ of material. Next small boards were nailed to the subfloor to create a stable platform for the router to ride on while very carefully removing the remainder of the material to the scribed line.
The paint and wax from the subfloor needed to be removed to ensure a solid glue joint, so they were ground off with 12 grit discs on the edger. You can see how messy this gets in the video, as the small chunks of wax and paint ball up and get thrown from under the sander.
The sides of the inlay were tapered slightly with a hand plane so it would slide into place more easily. Because the inlay was still somewhat warped, the edges were nailed down and several bags of concrete were placed on it to hold it in place for a few days while the glue set.
After this, the room was painted, then sanding began. You can see the large amount of paint on the floor just prior to sanding, but the 50 grit belt on the drum sander eats right through it. It’s easy enough to clean it off at that stage, and made painting much easier, since the floor didn’t need to be protected.
The floor is first sanded at an angle to flatten out the height differences between boards, then sanded with the grain to reduce the visibility of scratches. The medallion was sanded with the edger because the drum sander would have left deeper scratches that would be harder to sand out later.
After the entire floor had been rough sanded, wood putty was troweled over the floor to fill in any cracks and nail holes. The camera cut out briefly, so this part is missing from the video. Next, the filler is sanded off with 100 grit paper on both the machine and the edger. The filler sits in the scratches left by the previous sanding pass, so it also works as a visual aid to see when those scratches have been removed.
Custom transitions were then fabricated and installed at each of the doorways, the corners were hand scraped, and the floor buffed to an even complexion. The medallion was sanded with a fine stroke orbital to bring it to an even smoother polish.
After vacuuming up any remaining fine dust, the floor was sealed with Bona IntenseSeal to bring out more depth in the wood. You can see how the tone goes from pale and washed out to a nice richness with the application of the sealer.
The finish is abraded between coats to smooth out any roughness and ensure good adhesion. The top two coats are Bona Mega satin, a single component water-based finish that is easy to work with and doesn’t produce noxious fumes. The final coat was applied with a roller to get a very even texture across the entire surface.
The project took a total of about 20 hours of work spread across several days. Because all of the wood was acquired for free, the entire material cost (nails, glue, sandpaper, filler, finish) was only about $150.