Posted 13th February 2025 by Mongers Admin
RECLAIMED FLOORING
The new reclaimed building project had been progressing quite slowly last autumn. We sold the house and shop in August and moved the business online, which took up much of everybody’s time and effort. We have had to move into our holiday cottage, temporarily, until the new house is finished, but now, with the coming of a new year, we are all back onto the build with enthusiasm and at pace. In the interim a large amount of the work that is not reclaimed has been completed. With most of the windows in place we have a watertight environment. Now with the majority of the walls, that are not clad, plastered and with the underfloor heating, first fix plumbing and electrics completed we are progressing with the interiors.
RECLAIMED WOOD FLOORING
There is a reclaimed market for all types of flooring that can be purchased new, so our choice is not so much availability but what suits the house. Although we do have a large floor area to cover and so quantity is a consideration as we want a relatively uniform look to the interiors.
Our original showroom had a perfect polished concrete floor and I was very keen to preserve as much of this as we could. This has been kept for our new kitchen floor.
Throughout the rest of the property we are having wooden floors except in a couple of the bathrooms and the utility room which are being tiled. I’m not really a carpet sort of person, preferring timber floors and vintage or antique rugs. The choice of wooden flooring is immense. From Victorian Douglas fir floorboards to modern engineered eastern European oak. All is pretty durable with the right treatment and finish; all should be relatively stable if dry and well-seasoned and all will look lovely.
The choice we made was governed by what was in my timber shed in abundance and, like, I suspect, many yards up and down the country we have piles of parquet. Why? Well builders and DIYer’s are wary of parquet because of the labour involved in getting it laid. It is usually a cheap product to buy from site and so it should be, as, if originally laid on bitumen, it is easy to lift with a shovel. The expense and labour comes in preparing it. Cleaning the blocks and making a smooth, flat sub-floor to glue them to.
We are using 100 sq m of a pitch pine block from St Clements church in Ipswich. This I purchased a few years back at a cost of £6 per sq m plus transportation. Each block is 42mm thick and the original intension was to split the blocks but finding a wood yard with time to do it proved difficult, so we just cleaned them instead.
How to clean a reclaimed woodblock:
It’s easy. Choose a cold day. Get a hammer and a scraper. Hit the bitumen hard on the bottom of the block and it will shatter enough that you can scrape all the lumps off with your scraper. Clean the sides and go onto the next block. After a couple of weeks of this you will be as fed-up as my staff were, but it will be job done and you are ready to lay a beautiful floor.
Our floors are laid in a herringbone pattern with a border round the edge. Start in the centre and move to the sides so that the floor is symmetrical. Lightly sand to remove any high edges and wax or oil.
In the upstairs bedroom we are using a beech strip floor. Beech and Maple, being very hardwearing and easy to maintain, were commonly used in gyms and squash courts. We had a large quantity of this flooring from a gym that does not have an enormous market in rural Norfolk. Most of our customers are looking for antique pine or oak for renovations and extension to period property, but this style of hardwood floor, being warm and light, will be ideal for our building.
RECLAIMED TILES
There is a great danger that reclaimed building materials will run out, not for lack of availability but because so many cannot be removed without damage. An important message to anyone using reclaimed materials is to use a reversable method of fixing. Floor tiles are available in abundance but anything laid in the last 50 years will probably break rathe than lift due to the cement content of the mortar that they were set on.
Antique floor tiles and stone coverings vary an enormous amount depending on the part of the country that you live in. In Norfolk we have beautiful pamment tiles, which will be described in depth later in this blog, but we are not using them in the house as they do not really suit the style of the interiors. The Victorians, with the invention of machine made clay tiles, created a more uniform and harder tile and these are what we have incorporated into this build.
These six inch square quarry tiles, which our builders lifted from a restoration in a Norwich church, are perfect for two small bathrooms. The black tiles are Staffordshire blue clay, reputedly the hardest clay known in the British Isles and widely used for exterior paths and hallways, where something hardwearing and frost resistance was needed, until the raw material ran out in the 1920’s.