I started the flooring a bit "early," but I knew that I wanted to use more of my can of Tried & True linseed and beeswax finish, and it takes time to really cure, so I figured it would be wise to have it thoroughly dry, since I know I want to put petitpoint carpets on the floor!
I was pretty sure before I started that craft sticks would be my choice of material, offering a good balance between looks, ease, and affordability. Many miniaturists use a single sheet of wood and score lines to simulate planks -- this is good if you want a uniform color and grain, and presumably it is very easy to apply as there is only one piece! But I wanted that random look of an authentic not-high-end period floor, which would often have a considerable range of colors even of the same type of wood, and grains as well, in addition to the unevenness we often see now in period floors, due to warping of the individual planks and settling of the building itself. You can get or cut very nice pieces of oak or walnut or whatever kind of wood for a 1:12 floor, really, and cut planks to the desired width and length, but craft sticks, other than trimming off the rounded ends, are ready-to-go.
David cut a "subfloor" of 1/8" plywood for me, which was exactly the right thickness when combined with the craft sticks to meet the sill of the internal door I am adding on the back wall.
The first step was finding out how wide to make the planks. Before lumber mills, wood flooring planks were however wide the tree itself was, so could vary fairly widely even in the same room, but then as techniques improved, board widths became more standardized. According to Buildingconservation.com, "in the late 18th century boards … became much narrower [than the Jacobean "up to 60cm wide" (over 23 in.!)], usually 15 to 20cm wide [about 5.9-7.8 in.]," but in the Regency period (1811-1837), "as England’s vast forests thinned out, wood became less plentiful and the width of the boards narrowed to between 18 and 23cm [7-9 in.]". In America, however, because natural resources were more abundant, wide planks stayed common into the 19th century, with narrower planks -- because they were more expensive to produce -- more fashionable, and then as transportation as well as production became more efficient, the narrower planks became the standard for flooring. Being 1" wide, the large craft sticks are really too wide for true scale -- that would be 12" planks -- but after much internal debate (including the option of laboriously cutting about a third or even a quarter of the width from each craft stick!), I decided to use the 1" sticks as-is. My idea is that this particular shop is the least-renovated of the three on the street, so will be a bit run-down -- though I hope in an appealing way! -- and the other two will most likely have been "updated" to more fashionable narrow planking. A more meticulous miniaturist would doubtless squirm a bit at the inaccurate scale, but with luck I hope that the carpet shop floor will just read "old" and not "anachronistically wide"! The French oak boards in the room view here, for example, look extraordinarily wide though the description says they are a perfectly period-accurate 14 to 22cm, so my carpet shop boards will just actually be wide!
The direction of the floorboards also cost me an afternoon happily spent researching the construction of late-Georgian floors in England and America. (This is actually one of the geeky things I love about miniatures and historical knitting -- the research into how and why things were done the way they were!) I had originally pictured in my mind that the boards would run parallel to the side walls, meaning that the (imaginary, here) joists would run across the room -- I think this seemed "right" to me because it would make the room look deeper, in the same way that horizontal or vertical stripes on clothing affect the appearance of one's figure. Although some of the apparently-categorical statements seemed to contradict each other, a number of the sources I found said that joists ran parallel to common walls, for two reasons that made very good sense to me now, i.e. expense and fire protection. Describing a "typical upper floor from about 1880" in a terraced house, Marshall et al. in The Construction of Houses say, "[the] joists run side to side," the principle apparently being that the longer the joist, the more expensive, hence the joists would run across the narrower span, which in a terraced house would be from side to side (p.108), and “where issues of restraint and fire protection were not important, the joists would normally be found spanning the shortest distance across a room” (p.110, emphasis added). “Joists should not be built into party walls to ensure fire protection, sound insulation, thermal insulation and also to help prevent air leakage” (p.120).
And how far apart were the joists in an 18th-century building? Marshall et al. again: "Traditionally, joists were normally fixed at 400mm (16") centres [that is, from the center of one joist to the center of the next]. This is probably the most economic arrangement of the timbers…. However, building control was fairly lax until the development of Model Bye-laws [i.e. building regulations] in the first part of the twentieth century and it is not unusual to find joists at centres of 500mm or even 600mm [19 1/2 to 23 1/2 in.]” (p.108). A rather magisterial paper entitled "The Structure of Georgian London Houses" says, "floors of normal spans in houses of second, third and fourth rates [houses were categorized by size and cost, in order to fix ground-rent rates and assess taxes], timber joists were laid with 12 inches between each joist (Bell, p.4). I compromised a bit and drew pencil lines on my subfloor 1 1/4 in. apart (15" in full scale), so that I could place the butted ends of the planks on top of a "joist" and the joins would line up logically, the way a real floor would.
As it turned out, the craft sticks were exceptionally suitable for a well-used period floor, for upon opening the package, I found that I loved the slight warping and cupping and nicks, bumping, etc. on them, so I just chose mostly the darker ones, or those with interesting grains. And then I had to trim off all of the rounded ends!
David had thought that after I cut and arranged the dozens of sticks together like puzzle pieces, I could simply spread a layer of glue over the subfloor and lay the planks all on at once, bar perhaps a first row that was already glued and dry to give me something to push the subsequent rows firmly against. But as it turned out, it was more fiddly than expected because when just laid out unglued, the sticks didn't nestle up perfectly snugly, and so it wasn't easy sometimes to tell that a stick was actually too warped and needed a sliver trimmed off here or there. The idea is that, say, a penny might be lost down a gap in the floorboards, not a dog or a small child! and so this meant that I could glue only two or three rows at a time, so as to check the fit as I went along. But it took less than a week to lay the whole floor, even with lots of drying time, so this wasn't particularly onerous.
Craft sticks are apparently usually birch, much blonder than the usual oak or Baltic pine used for floors in the Georgian period, either in Britain or America. I had something very dark in my mind's eye, though it seems that floors came in quite a few colors and types of wood, and of course the natural variations of wood mean that even different planks of the same type of wood could be noticeably different, especially with age. (There is a photo of a beautiful hemlock floor in an article at Jane Austen's World, though alas with no source credit.)
Here is a lesson, should you need one, on the value of stirring stains before use. I always find it such a bother, and then I have a wet-stain-covered stick afterwards which can't just be set down any-old-where. The far left of this stick is bare (where I was holding it), and the next inch or so is a color test with my cloth dipped in the stain after swirling the sealed can around for some minutes. It is an okay color, but not what I was hoping for. The part on the right is from using this stick to then actually stir the stain and wipe off the excess with the piece of cloth I then used to apply the stain to the floor itself. The instructions on the can to stir "before and during application" are thoroughly correct, I can now humbly attest -- I could feel the pigment collected like sediment at the bottom of the can, and it seemed to cling to the stick much more than it in fact incorporated into the oil medium, as the color was noticeably darker when wiped off of the stick than even when my cloth was dipped into the thoroughly-stirred can. The stain is Zar's Oil-Based Interior Wood Stain in "Moorish Teak," the blackest brown I saw on the shelf in an oil-based stain.
Once they were actually butted up tightly next to each other, the craft sticks naturally took up less space than I had calculated, so there was a fraction of subfloor left that would just miss being covered by the baseboards -- maybe 5cm, less than a 1/4 inch. I therefore had to glue on another row of sticks, leaving them hanging over the edge of the plywood, and when it was dry, David trimmed it off with his saw, and while he was there cut a notch out for the sill of the inner door. (The floor is face-down in the above photograph, so that he could see where to trim.)
Glued, trimmed, lightly sanded (it didn't need much, just some of the end-to-end joins that had lifted ever-so-slightly), and ready for staining, with a penny for scale.
This is the bare craft sticks -- still quite handsome. Some other time, I might just leave the sticks their natural color.
After one coat of stain -- very nice, but I wanted it dark, so I put on another coat.
After the second coat of stain. I had pictured the floor still-darker in my mind, but I decided to stay with this -- it does look a bit darker in real life. I can see why people get so fascinated with wood in all of its incarnations -- each of these little boards is unique, some with more of a straight grain while others are curved, some almost speckly, and each takes the stain differently. I'm really happy with the irregularities of the craft sticks too, the notched or bumped edges, some warping sideways while others cup, "chatter marks" from the saw -- I probably would have been delighted with more irregularities, but this is my first build, there's time!
And of course during the finishing process, I "aged" the floor, nicking and scratching and sanding a bit here and here -- between coats of the stain and of the finish -- to get the effect of an accumulation of wear. I pretty much just attacked it with whatever came to hand -- the paint can opener, sandpaper, my keys, a penny that I stood on its edge and whacked with a hammer, etc. Julia was aghast -- "that's so wrong!" -- but a moment later was attempting to scratch it with her fingernails. (This of course had no effect, since it was already the second coat of Tried & True!) I left a wet tea bag on it for a few hours, but even after just the stain, there was enough oil in the finish that the water just beaded and wiped right off! so I suppose if I really want a "water stain" I might need to leave it on for days, or perhaps fake it ahead of time with some glue, which would prevent the stain from having an effect (which is in fact what everyone warns about when you are putting kits together, not to get glue on the parts you are going to stain!).
The baseboard is just set in place at the moment -- gluing that in comes much later. Next is to finish the sanding, and then start to paint ....
(I love the way that the fabric I tossed behind as a backdrop looks like drifted snow!)
