The use of bamboo as an option for ‘green’ flooring is already much talked about. But, we do have other options too. Reclaimed hardwood flooring is another equally good, if not a better, ‘ green’ alternative for flooring. Reclaimed flooring achieves the same goal of preserving the environments as is realized by recycling of old paper, plastic and metals.
Reclaimed flooring means flooring that has been prepared from wood salvaged from old buildings, factories and warehouses etc. For long the buildings have been razed to ground and leveled to make way for new structures and the materials used for construction of old buildings were sent to landfills. And, one of these materials has been wood. Agreed, that the circumstances demand demolishing old buildings but why not salvage materials, particularly natural material like wood and reuse the same. Reclaimed flooring just does the same, enabling use of wood, so salvaged from old buildings, as an excellent flooring material for the present day new buildings.
Old buildings of the 188’s or 1900’s not only have exceptional architecture, but also employed amazing materials for their construction. It’s difficult to imagine using heavy heart pine beams of 12″ thickness and 16″ or more width and many feet long because we don’t get to see such trees these days, simply because we don’t give the needed time of about a hundred years for wood to mature. The earlier generations had virgin forests do depend upon for that kind and size of wood. Even floors were made from that quality of wood. It’s not difficult to imagine the strength of such wood that could support so heavy structures without failing for hundreds of years. This wood has had very fine grain structure. Different varieties of wood were used for construction proposes of that time. One often comes across the use of oak, both, red and white, heart pine hickory and now almost extinct chestnut in those buildings. Can we let go such wood to landfills or just burn it? It must be reused and fortunately means are available for doing the needful.
Here, let’s have a look at the process of reclaiming wood from the condemned material that would have otherwise been sent or landfill or burning. The used material is sent for remanufacturing. As a first step, it is examined for removal of nails, nuts and bolts or other such material that might have been used years ago at the time of construction of the building. The heavy big beams are then re-sawn into boards needed for making of floors. Just imagine that an old 20 feet long beam 12 inches thick and s16” inches wide gives flooring material worth over 400 square feet!
Once the beam has been re-sawn into planks, it may be ripped to have a reduced width. For example a beam of 12”X16” can be cut to get 16 boards, each 12” wide and 7/8” thick. Each board of 12” is then cut into two to get 32 boards, each 6” wide. As wood has some natural element of water in it, the boards are treated in a kiln to get rid of moisture, which causes wood to bend or warp, thus making it unfit for use. The process is known as kiln drying. In simple words in involves heating of wood in controlled atmosphere so that all the retained water is evaporated without causing any harm to wood. Finally, the treated boards are taken to special purpose machine called matcher where it is given tongue-and-grove arrangement that enables two planks to fit into each other.
Having gone thru all the processes described above, the wood that was intended for destruction is shaped for being installed as a fresh and new flooring material. This flooring has exceptionally good quality. These days it may not be possible to get wood in such color and characteristics. You get excellent wood without causing any harm to environments. While you help to keep the world “green”, you get unique wood, one of its kinds that are not available anywhere in the rest of the world. There is another interesting part. It is not uncommon for the sellers of such wood to tell you some history of the wood you are buying. You may know the exact building from where this wood was removed for reprocessing and if you are among the lucky ones, you may get a photograph of the old building. So, you are buying a part of history, not just flooring!
It’s about time that we all started giving second thoughts to killing tress for making our floors. If you insist on using wood as a flooring material, explore the possibility of using reclaimed wood.
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