We knew we had a severe termite problem when they made their way through the middle of our living room floor. To address the problem we had the house tented and filled with a recitation of my lesser ideas. Believe me, those termites quickly left and ran down Sunset Boulevard! When it came to fixing the floor the pest control person suggested wood putty. Ugh.

Thankfully, when I installed our floor fifteen years ago I saved some scraps for such a contingency. So here’s how to fix a hole in a wood floor without resorting to wood putty:

1. First, carefully remove the damaged piece. You could do this with a circular saw but I used a chisel and mallet to avoid the risk of damaging the adjoining, undamaged flooring. Living in the hipster capital of the West Coast I, naturally, used a bespoke mallet I made myself. Be careful to avoid banging your chisel into a nail (this is why I used a cheap chisel rather than, say, a bespoke hand hammered one). I chiseled down the center of the damaged piece of wood and then carefully explored the edge of the wood where you’ll find nails. Once I removed most of the wood I used a small crowbar to remove the rest.

2. Next, use your chisel remove the tongue on the adjoining strip of flooring. This will make it easier to put in the replacement piece. You’ll be left with a hole in the floor that looks like this:

3. Now place your new strip of wood next to where the damaged piece used to be. Carefully mark where you need to cut the piece. For the sake of accuracy, I’m fond of a striking knife rather than a pencil. You could also use a razor blade. You’ve probably heard the adage, “measure twice, cut once.” But this repair is a perfect example of why it’s actually best not to measure things with a ruler but instead to hold the piece to be cut up to what it needs to fit into. And for this repair, since we need a precise fit, I cut the new piece a little bit long and filed it down.

4. You also need to remove the tongue on the replacement piece. I did this with a chisel.

5. Once you have a good fit you can nail the new piece down with finishing nails. You will need to use a small amount of putty to hide the nails.

If I had a larger section of floor to repair I’d rent a floor nailer which places the nails at an angle through the tongue and groove. This tools hides the nail holes and keeps the flooring snug.

If I were installing a new floor I would highly recommend renting a pneumatic flooring nailer. Our small living room and hallway required 1,000 nails and my arm hurt for a week after using a manual nailer.

And, at the risk of ascending the saddle of my very high horse, let me use this moment to express my disdain for laminate flooring. The interwebs are full of propaganda about how laminate flooring is, “better than it used to be.” The facts are still the same: laminate flooring doesn’t look like real wood and it can’t be sanded. It’s yet another disposable item to clog our landfills along with its laminate brethren, i.e. crap from Ikea. Go ahead and eat the meatballs but please pass on the laminates.

The irony of using an iPad to access 19th and early 20th century literature is not lost on me, but I’m really enjoying reading original source material from the Arts and Crafts and bungalow movement. Deep in the pages of Bungalow Magazine I found an ad for the Murphy bed’s forgotten competitor, the Sorlien ceiling bed.

The Sorlien company’s contraption hides the bed in the ceiling rafters. As you can see in Sorlien’s 1913 patent, you lower the bed via a crank in the wall. Weights, also hidden in the wall, counterbalance the bed. Folding legs on the bottom of the bed deploy like landing gear on a UFO so that you’re not swinging from a chain all night (although that sounds kinda fun).

Wait, they did that in the 1970s. But I digress.

Sorlien’s invention never caught on and the company diversified into tent trailers. But it appears that the tiny house folks have revived the ceiling bed idea.

Sears Modern Home blog has more information on the Sorlien bed.

Kelly and I have done a lot of crazy how-to projects, mostly just for the sake of doing crazy how-to projects but, occasionally, in the service of this blog or our books. Lately, I’ve been thinking of paring down our disparate activities to only the most useful. And there’s no doubt in my mind that the skill I need most would be carpentry/woodworking.

We live in a small, nearly 100 year old house that needs constant work and I’m the incompetent building supervisor. Any tradesperson who knows what they are doing will not take small jobs at our house so I often have to do things myself. Why it didn’t occur to me sooner is a mystery, but I’ve realized my carpentry powerlessness and the need to seek out a higher power that can only be found in the form of a shop class.

So I build a mallet in the course of an entertaining three week class at Community Woodshop. Even their safety orientation was full of useful information and hands-on learning. The mallet class was a great way to pick up skills involving measurement, sharpening, the use of hand tools and elementary joinery (mortise and tenon). Because it was just a mallet I didn’t feel attached to the outcome. In fact, the more mistakes I made in the presence of the instructor, the more I think I learned. I’m kind of glad I broke tenon just so I could learn how it could be fixed and the mistake hidden. I also learned that much of woodwork is paradoxically about metal work: the use and maintenance of metal tools.

I’ve done a lot of carpentry over the years such as building sheds, chicken coops, laying floors, repairing joists and hanging molding. I’ve done this all with hand held power tools. But I have very limited experience with chisels and planes as well as shop machines such as table saws and bandsaws. And I’ve never paid enough attention to the details.

Kelly is thrilled with my attempt to, ever so slightly, raise the quality of work around the casa. What I learned about sharpening and hand plane use already paid off in an unexpected application: fixing a broken window.

If you’re in the Los Angeles area there are three places to take woodworking classes that I know of: Allied Woodshop, Community Woodshop and Ceritos Community College. I hear that the folks at Allied Woodshop are soon to open a business selling wood from locally felled urban trees. There are a lot of exotic trees in LA, so it will be interesting to see what people do with results of LA’s poor tree maintenance.

Root Simple reader Nicole H sent me the Midwestern equivalent of the Pacific Ready-Cut kit home catalog I posted on Monday: the Chicago Wrecking Company’s 1913 A Book of Plans. They later, and wisely, changed the name of the company to Harris Brothers Homes.

The catalog contains Wrightian styles like the one above.

As well as the 1913 version of a tiny house.

Need a barn? They’ve got you covered.

Want to open a store? They’ve got a plan for that too.

The catalog contains customer testimonials such as this one from an early house flipper:

Dear Sirs:
We received the material for the house and was [sic] greatly pleased with the same. Everything was exactly as represented in your catalog and the lumber was of far better quality than I could have gotten here at a higher price.

Before we had the house nearly finished, a gentleman bought it and we realized a neat sum for our work. He now likes his cottage home so well he would not take double the price he paid me for it.
(signed). LILLY H. DAY

It’s interesting to see the subtle similarities and differences between these houses and the ones in the Pacific Ready-Cut catalog.

Between Archive.org and Google Books, there’s a whole universe of copyright free literature to read.

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