How to Install Reclaimed Wood Flooring

Enlarge Image Image Gallery From plywood to hardwood flooring, to windows, doors, carpeting and more, salvaging building materials can save you thousands of dollars (and is about as green as you can get). “Building with Secondhand Stuff” is a hands-on, do-it-yourselfer's guide that shows you how to identify materials that can be salvaged efficiently and then gives you step-by-step instructions on how to go about doing it. Photo Courtesy Creative Publishing International, Inc.

Reclaimed wood floors bring a unique character to your home, but salvaging and installing reclaimed wood flooring can be a daunting task. In this excerpt from Building with Secondhand Stuff (Creative Publishing, 2011), author Chris Peterson offers step-by-step instructions, complete with full-color photographs, to make installing your own reclaimed wood floors easy. Learn about the nuances of wide plank flooring and find out how to mill your reclaimed planks to create tongue-and-groove flooring. The excerpt is taken from the chapter Reclaiming Heritage Wood. 

Reclaimed Wood Flooring

A home’s flooring is all about beauty and comfort underfoot. No flooring is more beautiful and comfortable than wood, and no wood brings a more unique character to your home than a reclaimed wood floor. Once you begin looking for just the right reclaimed wood, you’ll inevitably realize that the biggest challenge is narrowing down the amazing number of choices to find the best look for your home.

Old houses and other buildings yield a wealth of wood flooring that can be brought back to life in your home. These include the standard strip flooring harvested from more recent buildings being deconstructed, the plank flooring common to older buildings, more unusual pegged floors (which require special techniques to salvage and re-lay), and even end grain flooring, a tile-type of floor using “bricks” of wood. But older buildings also provide other elements, such as siding and paneling, which can be repurposed as new wood flooring. Even beams and other timbers can be milled to serve as flooring. You simply won’t find a larger selection of potential species, styles, and looks for a floor than among reclaimed wood.

There are two ways to get the flooring material you want in the amount you need. The first is to go to the source. Wood flooring is one of the easiest elements to salvage from a building. Removing elements like flooring during deconstruction is called “soft-stripping” for just that reason. Unlike structural members, flooring can be removed with relatively little expertise or effort. Even if you’re faced with converting square-cut siding or paneling to your purposes, you can turn it into flooring by milling your own tongue and grooves into the boards. Certainly, this is a lot of work and requires the right tools and attention to detail. But do-it-yourself milling can save you enormous amounts of money.

However, you may simply prefer to go the easier route and purchase reclaimed flooring in quantity from any of a number of salvage firms and companies that deal in reclaimed wood. Consider available stock carefully. Not only do you need to ensure that the amount of a given flooring available through the supplier is sufficient for your needs, you also need to know the flooring you buy is fairly consistent board to board. In most cases, the company will have removed all the boards as part of a single salvage project, so the boards were already fit together as a floor. Sometimes, a bit of mixing and matching does occur. But for the most part, suppliers will have grouped like boards, and many even pre-finish the boards, making installation even easier.