There are a few drawbacks to being an engineer specialising in the timber- flooring sector, apart from having a head full of useless information, as demonstrated above.
Think of all of those nice new restaurants you have visited, anticipating the culinary delights that await you. Not me, I go in with my head down: “Mmm, walnut again, should have used maple, would have gone much better with the birch furniture, and it’s harder-wearing . . . ”
My wife, Pam, and I once walked halfway across Dublin on my insistence to visit the new Monsoon clothes shop. She thought I was being a kind and thoughtful husband; actually I had heard they were using an engineered French oak floor.
So when it came to specifying the hardwood floor for the house we had a dilemma. Most of the mills we use around the world had heard of the famous house we were building and were angling to supply the wood flooring. We were flattered, but who to choose and who to let down? The bedrooms were easy: it had to be a natural fibre rather than man-made fabrics, so we chose wool carpet, to match the insulation.
Our dilemma was resolved by a visit to a supplier’s warehouse in Britain, when I spied a dark bundle of flooring tucked away in a corner. Wayne, the boss of the company, is a born “dealer” from London. At his best he can make Arthur Daley sound like the local vicar asking for contributions to the raffle.
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“Is that load for sale, Wayne?” I asked, and waited for the pitch. “Everything is for sale in this warehouse, my son, now what’s the offer?” I looked at the dusty pile of wood covered in “failed quality control” stickers. “Bad machining” and “pile of crap” were scrawled in the thick layer of dust that covered the flooring to add insult to the injury.
“Where is this heading for?” I asked.Wayne told me the flooring had been rejected from a site and was heading for the waste bin. This was it. I would save this precious wood from an untimely end. I could recycle it, extend its life, give it a nice warm home. With a few careful strokes of a carpenter’s chisel, this flooring could be restored to its former glory.
I made a quick call to Pam for style approval. After all she would have to be staring at it for just as long as I would, and was in charge of the colour palette. “Does it look good?” Okay, so I lied: “Yeah, really good quality stuff, American white oak.” Having reassured her, for effect, that this was the best, Pam agreed that was fine by her.
That was the easy part. Now back to Wayne. My interest had suddenly changed his initial perception that this particular wood was a waste material. “When I say waste,” said Wayne, “I mean it’s American white oak, you know. The best.”
“Look, Wayne, I know what it is. €500 the lot, my last offer.”
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“Yours, my son.” The handshake was made and this “pile of crap” was ours, bought for a quarter of the market price.
The original source of wood is very important. We hear every day about rainforests being cut down and how illegal logging can lead to global warming. These are real, tangible dangers. Every piece of wood you buy should be sourced from well-managed forests.
Price is also important, I know, but spare a thought for the people whose lives are connected to the forest.
When the time came to lay the flooring, all eyes were on me: the Big Kahuna of wood flooring does his own thing. I felt I had to explain when it was finally delivered. Ger, my building contractor and chief ally on site, looked at me as his men offloaded the flooring piece by piece.
“Not the best, Peter,” he said. I respect his opinion highly. “But it was heading for the skip — we saved it from death,” I told him. By now, Ger was used to these emotional ties I seemed to have with inanimate pieces of wood. He looked at me, then turned to his floor-layer and instructed that every piece should be measured and sorted so alterations were minimised.
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For the finishing, I called in a good friend in Donegal who sands and seals floors for a living. “This is a fantastic floor,” he said. “American oak, isn’t it? Must have cost you a fortune. Nothing but the best for the hardwood flooring guru, eh?” I hesitated before deflating his enthusiasm. “You would never guess, Michael . . . ”
We calculated that more than 300 people have walked across our recycled flooring to date, and those that noticed spoke highly of the hardwood flooring. The true cost for supply, fit, sand and seal for the floor should have been nearly €100 per square metre, but between you and me, we paid nowhere near that. Thanks, Wayne — a real deal, eh?
ecopile@blue-evolution.ie