Right in Front of our Nose

It is funny what is staring you in the face and you are too dim to realize it. Actually it is not funny, it is a tad embarrassing and a whole bunch of frustrating. Fortunately we came to our senses just in the nick of time.

The roof is progressing and the framing guys want to start work on the loft/mezzanine area this week, I call it a loft and Kyle calls it a mezzanine, I say our house isn't a hotel so it is a loft. It is on the second floor where the stairs land and is open to below and gains access to the master bedroom.

The floor of this area also serves as the ceiling of the lower floor which means we wanted plank flooring that could be seen from both sides rather than an engineered floor. We also wanted spacing in between the planks so no flooring with tongue and groove but with finished sides.

The whole mission with this house is to re-use and re-purpose as much as we can alongside with responsible new materials where we have to. Our framer had a few ideas for some cool flooring using FSC products but we also liked the idea of parts of our house having a previous story, like our containers and doors etc.. so I started to call around to some wood salvage yards.

There are amazing options out there from French cow barns to southern threshing floors and there are some amazing prices. Understandably so, the work involved to source these places, meticulously dismantle, clean up and plane the wood, ship it from the source, is immense and you can spend huge dollars, I saw some floor planks at $43 ft2...Eeeek!

So on Saturday we bundled ourselves off to Auburn, CA to a hardwood supplier that had a large yard of rough hewn wood to choose from. We were open to ANYTHING, mixed woods, stuff that needed A LOT of work, we were ready. So what do they show us - brand new milled oak.

Uh, not quite what we were looking for. They had great ideas of how to age and weather it chemically and though the price was fantastic, $3.50 ft2, it was milled 4 months ago and sure looked like it too. Grrrrr.

As we stood among giant tree rounds waiting to be milled with a UPRR cargo train blowing its whistle in the background we had an epiphany. We have wood, old salvaged wood with history and a story right in front of our noses. Our hay barn that was constructed from the first owners of the property from wood that was all cut and milled on the property. So off we toddled home to take a look and some measurements to make sure we have enough wood and, low and behold we do!!

Now we just need to empty all of our storage out of the second story, scare the wood boring bees away, pray there are no Black Widow spiders among all the spider webs we have to crawl through, pry up the boards and somehow manhandle 15 x 28', 3" thick boards out from the second story, down, over to the workshop and find a planer on Craigslist to clean them up. No Problem.