When we moved into our house we did what just about everyone does when they first move in…tore up carpets! Our house was built in 1979 and many rooms (and hallways) still had what appeared to be the original carpeting; a beautiful blood red, thick shaggy mat. We didn’t have the funds to pay a professional, so we tried our hand at flooring! Over the course of the following months I removed carpeting and replaced it with click-lock wood flooring in four bedrooms and a hallway, and restored a beautiful barn wood floor in our workshop turned classroom.
Lots of work, lots of fun, and an incredible transformation in the look of each room upon finishing!
But this post is not about those floors…it is about the other flooring experiment I decided to take on. Eventually I got to feeling sick of purchasing expensive wood flooring that was highly processed, shipped from afar, and certainly not sustainable. In my quest for an alternative, I had come across some pictures of beautiful cordwood floor projects and thought, wow! What an amazing idea! We have plenty of trees, we have a miter saw, I can do this!
Our house is a split level; the lower floor is finished but is half underground. While this is very convenient in many ways (a nice root cellar being one) it means that the floor doesn’t get a ton of light. There is an old laminate floor that is cold, drab, and peeling up in several places to expose concrete underneath. This is where I would try my hand at cordwood flooring.
I decided to start with the hallway because I had no idea how time intensive the project would be, nor how it would turn out.
First I took note of needed tools and materials:
- Miter saw-ours is a 10 inch blade, but I would recommend larger for a large area of if you prefer the look of larger tree cookies
- Freshly downed hardwood of preferred diameter.
- Hammer and pry bar (or whatever tools needed to remove old flooring)
- Strong wood glue, we used Loctite Premium 3X construction adhesive
- Orbital handheld sander and some sandpaper
- scrub brush, towels
- sanded grout
- 5 gallon bucket
- Linseed oil
- Floor finish
I then began by gathering logs (this was easy to find because we had a ton of downed brush from a small area we had cleared over the summer). I looked for recently cut straight wood (generally maple and pine) of about 3-5 inch diameter and brought the logs under cover to dry out a bit. After a week or two, I used a miter saw to cut the logs into rounds (about 1.5 inches thick). I clamped some scrap wood to the saw as a guide for width.
Once I had gathered a large quantity of tree cookies (and I mean large!) I brought them inside, spread them out, and let them dry out some more.
Meanwhile, I was tasked with the fun activity of peeling up the old,
very stuck laminate. Using a mini pry bar and a hammer I set out to tap and peel up as much of the old flooring as I could. This took some patience. Ultimately, I was left with a hallway of bare concrete.
The next step was the step I found by far the most frustrating in this process; the gluing of the tree slices to the concrete floor. I tried several types of adhesive to poor results, and finally settled on Loctite Premium 3X Construction Adhesive
While this still wasn’t perfect, and required reapplication in a number of spots, it held well enough for me to move to the next step…sanding.
Sanding was a bit of a challenge considering the fragility of the bonds, but with careful attention, I was able to use my handheld orbital sander to do a round of sanding to generally smooth and clean up the wood.
Next, I applied a 
layer of linseed oil, this is to protect the wood from moisture and keep excess grout from staining it too much. I applied a layer of oil with a large paintbrush and let dry.
Now for the fun part…grouting! For the grout, I used a sanded grout blend, and added about 1 parts sawdust to every 5 parts grout. I mixed the grout with water in a 5 gallon bucket (just a little at a time, being careful not to over moisturise) until the grout had a thick peanut butter like consistently.
I waited 10 minutes for the mixed grout to settle and bond, and then began grouting. Wearing plastic gloves, I used my hands to push grout into each of the cracks between the wood cookies, filling the spaces and doing my best to smooth it out.
Once the floor had been fully grouted and allowed several days to dry, I came 
in again with my sander, to even out the floor and sand off any grout that had stained the wood.
Finally, I topped the whole thing off with a coat of linseed based floor finish for a beautiful glossy sheen!
I had a ton of fun doing this project, and absolutely LOVE the way it turned out. I haven’t yet begun to undertake the kitchen and living room, a much larger space, but think it would look pretty amazing if we ever get there!
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