The Start of my White Pine Flooring

We thought about all kinds of flooring options, and considered that new tile they have that looks like wood flooring, but the $3000 dollar material cost was enough to choke my sheep, not to mention swallow up my wallet! So today, with tile prices in mind, and knowing our meager little farm had the trees to make our own wide pine flooring, we headed out into the woods with Chainsaw in hand.

I have been saving a stand of White Pine for the last twenty years and while the quality is not that great, it has some good size to it making this pine perfect for our wide pine floors that will match our #3 pine ceilings. In other words, it is going to have some knots.

Katie and my daughter tagged along as I started the process, felling the trees and cutting them into logs. In the future I will drag them out with my tractor, saw them into boards, dry them, form the shiplapped edges, install them by screwing and plugging it to the floor, sanding it and then putting polyurethane on the floor. In all, we should have $300 in costs, or about 10% of the cost of tile...and if people admire the floor when it is done, we can say, "Would you like to see the place they were growing?"

The first tree from a distance:


Sizing the tree up after it had been felled:


My daughter standing next to the tree while I limb it. This tree is about 30 inches in diameter as can be seen from the 24" log rule she is holding:


The first log. In total this single tree yielded 875 board feet, nearly enough to do my entire floor!


Talking to my daughter after dropping the second tree. She wanted to know if God was mad at me for cutting one of his trees (90 years old). It was a great conversation about God's gift to mankind and that he provided tree for us because he loves us so much! A great conversation and why it is good to bring kids with you sometimes.


After 267 years of faithful forest stewardship, God has blessed us abundantly with quality wood that we can use in our homes.

Those are some premium logs! Don't let them sit around so the ants get into them. The outer wood gives the finest pine boards. The inner wood yields the best dimensional. How long are you going to let them dry before you start to finish?

Nice Logs !

We put pine flooring through out our home thirty years ago.
Keep in mind. The pine will yellow very quickly and if you have
a good size dog, it will nail mark the floor. We have refinished
the living room floor twice. If you use hard wood plugs, it makes it
hard to get a smooth sand job against the soft pine. Don't bevel the
board edges as it makes it hard to refinish later. You'll have to hand
scrape the beveled edges to get them to match the newly sanded surface.
Other than that, they look great is an old building.

Somehow I double doodled !

Awesome!

A good friend of mine has built his entire house from his own timber. Its been a slow process for him but beautiful home for sure.

Again, nice...

tsb wrote:We put pine flooring through out our home thirty years ago.
Keep in mind. The pine will yellow very quickly and if you have
a good size dog, it will nail mark the floor. We have refinished
the living room floor twice. If you use hard wood plugs, it makes it
hard to get a smooth sand job against the soft pine. Don't bevel the
board edges as it makes it hard to refinish later. You'll have to hand
scrape the beveled edges to get them to match the newly sanded surface.
Other than that, they look great is an old building.

Somehow I double doodled !

thats some great advise^^^

Those butt end logs dont appear they will have many knots, those are some beauties! Im not a mill guy but the mill near me always tells me they want to saw my tree's sooner then later because they become much more difficult to cut later. If you were near me id give you plenty of pine tree's already down on the ground

Look forward to some more pics of how your going to turn those butts into lumber and the finished floor! (do you have milling attachment for a large chainsaw?)

Already have hardwood floors, the rock maple bar is currently drying out:

Richard,

You may want to consider using Waterlox tung oil rather than poly. A beautiful finish plus it is much easier to refinish a section of the floor should that be necessary. A bit pricey and time consuming but for me it was worth it. The floor below is finished with 4 coats of Waterlox tung oil and was sanded between the 3rd and 4th coats. This was also a start to finish do it yourself job. 5 years stacked in the cellar by the EFM brought the moisture down to around 8 % 3 weeks in a kiln then sorted, sized, T&G. I faced nailed with hard cut masonry nails as we like that look. The plant stand was made with some "left overs" and is also finished with tung oil. In the second picture the color is a bit washed out, the color is more like the first shot. This is cherry ,finished with tung oil, no stain.

Jim

14 years ago I built my home from rough sawn hemlock from land owned by a local water company. All the finish wood for my floors, cabinets, trim and stairs came from my property. I have built a lot of our furniture from the same materials. My supply is running low now but the sense of satisfaction that came from using our own was huge. Good luck with your floors, I am sure they will be beautiful. You can also go with a water based poly and that can be sanded in a small area for repairs as well. I use Tung oil on all my cabinetry and furniture. Good stuff!

Very nice photo's NoSmoke, you are correct about bringing the kids at times. My son is 5 and he gets all excited when we embark on the smallest of chores or what sparks his interest I will never know unless we experience it together. It is all the more rewarding when we can share the little conversations with developing minds. Coal warms my house and the family warms the heart. I can't wait to see the progress. I once built a great room 24 x 16 with local pine in the early 90's, cost was about 300.00 then from a local farm. I t + g the edges without the bevel glued and screwed and plugged and made my plugs with the scrap, and also defined the dinning area with mahogany plugs ( ex-wifes idea ). I know your floor will come out perfect, meaning there are no flaws when you create for the family!

For the most part my home has come from the farm here. I say that because there have been some things I have used that was not from here, but not a lot. By that I mean I have ordered some concrete, but have also mixed plenty of my own, and while I do not have a limestone quarry to make the cement, I do have a gravel pit in which to shovel out gravel with the tractor to mix up my own concrete.

Most of the wood products naturally came from the wood lot, like the framing, floors, ceilings and cabinets. In addition, most of the furniture I have made myself, but even some of the other non-wooden items have come from the farm in a way because I have cut loads of pulp and sold it to the paper mill, and then taken the money and bought the doors and windows, drywall and roof shingles as example.

Surprisingly, my home...which is cedar shingled...did not have its cedar shingles derived from the farm though we have plenty of cedar here and do have a shingle mill that is driven off the PTO of a tractor. It is just TOO dangerous to for me, and at $20 bucks a bundle, it is best I think to just buy them from Mabec. We have several sawmills on this farm: a 52 inch rotary saw mill that was driven by a 327 Chevy until it blew a rod out through the case, and while we have a 6 cylinder diesel ready to go, we have switched to using a Thomas bandsaw mill. The third sawmill we have is a home made sawmill my father and I welded up and used a chainsaw to cut the wood, but the 046 Stihl we used to drive it, was too low on power and so it sits idle for the most part. So for those keeping track, that is a shingle mill, a rotary mill, a bandsaw and chainsaw mill...yep we got about every saw mill base covered!

I do have a kiln of sorts, a solar kiln that can handle about 1000 BF of wood. It is just a glorified greenhouse that gets the temps inside up to 120 degrees, and then is wired for fans to blow the heated air around the stack of lumber. Nothing fancy, but it does work, especially for fairly stable wood like White Pine.

This is actually my second wooden floor. My first was made of White Ash, but after I gutted my home and made my 24 X40 Great Room, I decided rather then just add Ash to the rest of my home, I would just start over, but this time use White Pine which will match my ceilings.

Atlas, here is the good part...pictures! Many on here like junk, so this is a few pictures of our old rotary sawmill, a Lane Mill, built about 1901 and driven by a 1965 327 Chevy that came from an old dump truck we had. Yes it is cobbled together, but it sawed boards from 1980-2005 before the motor let go. Enjoy

NoSmoke hows the felling & hauling going? Or are you on to plankin & stackin?

NWBuilder wrote: You can also go with a water based poly and that can be sanded in a small area for repairs as well.

I found that the water based poly used on red oak left no color to the wood, without stain it was bla bla. Oil poly for all my floors.

Fabulon high voc, high gloss. Dries fast and hard.

wilder11354 wrote:NoSmoke hows the felling & hauling going? Or are you on to plankin & stackin?

It is going good.

I was able to get the Pine Logs out of the woods and into a pile since the weather has been good, the ground frozen and yet very little snow. I talked to the guy that is going to bring over his sawmill and make them into boards last night, and he said about the 3rd week of April he could do it. (Just a note on that; we have our own sawmill, but for 21 cents a bf, this Mennonite brings his sawmill over and converts logs into lumber which is not a bad deal. It is such a time-suck to do it yourself, that we have had him come over many times before). My father has a few thousand feet he wants sawn too, so we got plenty for him to do.

I am hoping I will have enough lumber from the pine, some spruce and fir I have piled up, and some cedar that I can build a small porch this summer (8X18). That might be asking too much, it is all out at work right now...so much they are hiring 720 new people, and all the over-time any of us can stand, and the new baby should be done brewing the first of June which will also take up some of my time. I do have 10 weeks off because of her though, so maybe I can get something done on the house as I "bond" with her.

Here is a photo of me pulling the logs out of the woods...