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Tag Archives: Douglas-fir

  • Finish that Douglas Fir II

    Posted on July 14, 2011 by Nicole

    As we mentioned in our last post about finishing Douglas fir, the finish itself can take much of the credit for protecting wood from the elements. And, in this post, when we say elements we mean those found indoors: shoes, toys, pets, spilled drinks, and other pesky household mini-storms. What are the things you should consider before finishing your Douglas fir? Read on, friends.

    Indoor Finishing Projects
    Interior projects, though sheltered from the forces of nature, still need to be protected from life’s hustle and bustle. Unprotected Douglas fir flooring can't compete with feet, furniture, and falling objects. Unfinished paneling in a bathroom would warp from all that hot shower steam. But, also know that you too play a part in prolonging your indoor wood – we’ll talk about some preventative measures to follow after finishing.

    finish wood floor

    Ahh, the gleam of a finished wood floor.

    Choose a finish with interior on the label. You’ll find both water-based and oil-based products. And really, either will do the job – it comes down to your personal preference and what you want your Douglas fir to look like. Water-based finishes dry faster, are less odorous and leave your fir with a more natural-looking finish. Oil-based products give you more time to get a smoother finish because they take longer to dry, but they’re smellier and leave your wood with an amber-like tone. When it comes to cost, water-based finishes tend to be more expensive.

    Should you go with a penetrating finish or surface finish? Again, this comes down to preference. Keep in mind that a penetrating finish soaks into the wood and helps bring out the wood’s natural beauty because they’re oil-based. A surface or topcoat finish forms a layer around the wood so nothing can get in. There are two schools of thought on the merits of each: 1) Wood needs to breathe and benefits from a penetrating finish; or, 2) Wood needs to be shielded which is what a surface finish does best.

    If you see polyurethane on the label know that the product is essentially made from plastic. Hence its shiny appearance. Polyurethanes do a darn good job at protecting against wear and tear, but come with volatile organic compounds (VOCs) which affect indoor air quality. Polyurethanes work best on harder-wearing surfaces like flooring.

    Moist conditions + preventative measures
    Keep wood away from water. If little hands drop a juice cup, be quick to wipe it up and air it dry. And, keep your wood clean, especially your floors. Sweep, vacuum, and dust regularly because dirt and grit is wood’s number one enemy.

    Dry conditions + preventative measures
    We also suggest keeping wood away from direct heat and sunlight. Excessive exposure to either will break down the finish and yellow the wood. And if you're seriously dedicated, during very dry conditions, use a home humidifier to keep moisture in the air to keep wood from losing its own natural moisture.

    No matter what your wood, or where it is located, a wood finish will help it last. Keep in mind the tips above, and talk to the expert at your local DIY store before you embark on finishing your Douglas fir.

    - Nicole Morales



    This post was posted in Douglas Fir Flooring, Douglas Fir Trim, Care & Maintenance and was tagged with Douglas-fir, Douglas fir flooring, douglas fir floors, fir flooring, flooring finishes, finishes, maintaining wood floors, maintaining fir floors, douglas fir trim, wood trim, finished doug fir flooring, douglas fir paneling

  • Douglas Fir Moulding and Trim

    Posted on May 25, 2011 by Jennifer

    In the simplest sense, baseboards have a humble function: they’re strips of wood attached to the bottom of the wall, wide enough to cover up the little gap around the edges of your flooring. But beautiful Douglas fir trim, or baseboards, can go beyond their utilitarian function to be a key design element, providing a visual marker that offsets both the walls and floors. They can set the tone for a room—a more formal home might have baseboards with an elaborately curved profile, while a modern or Asian-influenced home might have simple, straight baseboards.

    Choosing your style

    The size of your room: Although a standard height for baseboards is in the range of 3 ½ to 4 inches, a room with high ceilings can handle a wider baseboard, extending up to 10 inches up from the floor. A smaller room calls for a more minimal baseboard. AltruFir offers clear vertical grain Douglas fir trim in a variety of sizes, from small 2 or 3 inch wide baseboards to dramatic 10-inch baseboards that will make an eye-catching addition to a room.

    The stain or finish you want: Douglas fir baseboards accept paint or stain equally well, so consider whether you want wood tones or a more vibrant color. If you want to highlight the natural grain of the wood, you might consider a baseboard with clear vertical grain. If you plan to paint over it in the end anyway, a different grade of board might be fine for the job.

    Ordering baseboards

    douglas fir trim

    Douglas fir trim (1x4) available on our site.

    Once you’ve selected your moulding, it’s time to figure out how much you need. AltruFir sells trim by the lineal foot, which is simply the measurement of how long each board is. To figure out how many lineal feet you need, measure how long each wall is and then add up the total. Plan to order that amount plus a little bit extra—between 5-10 percent greater than your total. That’s just in case of mistakes, which can happen to even the handiest of home handy-people.

    When you’re ordering, you can buy your trim in an assorted package called “random lengths.” With random lengths, you get a mixed batch of boards of different sizes that all add up to a pre-agreed-upon amount of lineal feet. One of our random lengths packages will give you 25 lineal feet of board, made up of boards that are between 6 and 12 feet long. Or, you can order by the piece, specifying how many boards you want and of which sizes.

    Getting started

    Once you have your baseboards, sand, and stain and finish or paint them first, before installing. It’s much easier to sand and stain each piece pre-install, when you don’t have to stoop down to floor level to do the work, and you don’t have to worry about slopping paint or stain onto the walls and floors. You can go back and touch up your work afterward if necessary.

    Before you start nailing the boards to the wall, you need to know where the studs are. A stud is a supportive vertical board behind the sheetrock—when you start installing the baseboards, you’ll want to anchor them into those hidden studs. A simple tool called a stud finder, available at hardware stores for $10-20, will help with the process. In most standard construction, studs are located about every 16 inches along the wall.

    Start with your longest wall, and measure to find out exactly how long a piece of trim you need. Measure your board to the appropriate length and cut it to fit. When you make your cut, use a miter saw to make a diagonal 45-degree cut on either end of the piece, then nail it in place at the stud locations all along the length of the wall.

    When doing your nailing, you want to sink the nails down into the surface of the trim. This ensures that the nails get all the way through the baseboard, sheetrock, and into the stud behind them. It also allows you to fill in the nail holes with wood putty and sand over them for a smoother final finish. You can buy or rent a nail gun for the job, which will shoot them down into your trim, or you can do it the old-fashioned way using a hammer and a nail set. A nail set is a small piece of metal that looks something like an ice pick—you put the pointed end of the nail set onto the head of the nail, then hit the blunt end with a hammer, driving the nail all the way down into the wood.

    Joint work

    When you’re ready to fit the next piece of trim, take a small scrap piece of wood, cut the end off at a 45-degree angle, and test it to see whether or not it fits just right against the first piece. A lot of corners aren’t exactly 90 degrees, so you may have to adjust the angle on your saw up and down a bit, testing until you find the angle that gives you a snug mating piece. Then keep your saw at that angle while you cut the next piece of trim. Nail the next board in place, and continue the process all the way around the room.

    If you have an extremely long wall, longer than any of the pieces you ordered, you may need to use two pieces of wood, making what’s called a scarf joint. Cut a 45-degree angle at the end of your trim piece, angling away from the face of the board, toward the back. Then repeat the angle-testing process that you used on the corners to get a tight fit for the scarf joint. Use a fine layer of wood glue on one of the surfaces when attaching the two ends, then fasten in place with nails.

    If you come to a door casing, a built-in cabinet, or another flat surface on the edge of the wall, you can use what’s called a butt joint—simply make a flat 90-degree cut on the end of your trim piece and run it straight up against the other piece of wood.

    The final touch

    Once every piece is in place, cover nail holes with wood putty, let it dry, and sand lightly for a smooth finish. Using a small brush, touch up the nail holes and any other problem areas.

    When you’re all done, your Douglas fir trim will be a beautiful accent to the rest of your room—the finishing touch that ties your walls and fir floor together. Just because baseboards have the humble job of covering a gap doesn’t mean they can’t look good while they’re doing it.

    - Jennifer Rouse



    This post was posted in Douglas Fir Trim and was tagged with Douglas-fir, douglas fir trim, wood trim, installing trim

  • Douglas Fir in California Vacation Homes

    Posted on May 3, 2011 by Jennifer

    With summer on the horizon we’re thinking about how Douglas fir is put to use in vacation homes old and new. We’re traveling to California -- in this post and future posts -- to start our adventure. As part of the Douglas-fir’s native habitat, how has its lumber been used in California homes?

    The California landscape, from its majestic mountains to its sandy beaches, has long beckoned vacationers as a perfect getaway destination. And when it comes to building a vacation home, Douglas fir has been a material of choice for California cabins. A native West Coast species that’s both attractive and durable, Douglas fir echoes the best qualities of the California landscape and brings them into the home.

    From the Douglas Fir Plywood Association vacation home catalog.

    For much of America’s history, having two homes—one for daily life and the other solely for vacationing—was feasible only for the wealthy. It wasn’t until the middle of the twentieth century that average Americans began thinking about owning a second home. According to a 2004 article in Old House Journal, “The mid-20th century was the era of the ‘second everything,’ when postwar prosperity made second televisions, second bathrooms, and second cars the just desserts of middle-class American life. Signs at hardware stores and ads in popular magazines took the idea to the next step, declaring, ‘Every family needs two homes!...one for the work-week, one for pure pleasure.’”

    When the idea that vacation homes could be affordable and accessible caught on, Douglas fir was the material many Americans turned to in order to build them. The Douglas Fir Plywood Association was one of the first trade groups to tap into the growing market. In 1958 it issued a book called “Leisure-Time Homes of Fir Plywood” that included plans for five different models of vacation house. The plans relied extensively on use of pre-formed Douglas fir beams and panels, for a streamlined construction method that owners could do themselves. The publisher promised that the simple Douglas fir panels would age well, weathering the home “into a glistening castle of driftwood.”

    Douglas Fir Plywood Association beach house model.

    Author Chad Randi, in an article written for the Society of Architectural Historians, said that these early, modest vacation homes, with their reliance on natural materials like Douglas fir, “exhibited a harmony with nature and blurring of the distinction between interior and exterior through the creative use of glazing and natural, unfinished materials.”

    As the ‘50s moved into the ‘60s, California vacation homes began to get more elaborate. The Sea Ranch, in Sonoma, Calif., is a planned vacation community developed in 1960s by architects Lawrence Halperin, Charles Moore, William Turnbull and Joseph Esherick. The houses were intentionally designed to reflect the natural surroundings of the Northern California coast. They used local lumber mills to supply Douglas-fir and Redwood as the main building materials, and the homes feature unpainted or muted stains on the exterior, allowing the natural materials to blend with the beauty of the landscape. Interiors of the many of the homes also feature floor-to-ceiling vertical Douglas floor paneling as a way to bring the natural world inside. A 2008 article in the New York Times described a visit to the Sea Ranch, calling a Turnbull-designed house featuring Douglas fir interiors “poetry in wood.”

    Now, contemporary Californians are restoring the beauty of some of the mid-century vacation homes that have been neglected over the years. In Encinitas, Calif., stucco and sheetrock had covered up the original Douglas fir of a beach house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The new owner stripped away the decades of neglect and the house now features exposed Douglas-fir beams and soaring ceilings. The cabinets and walls also feature Douglas-fir, in a deliberate effort to use as many of the original natural building materials as possible, according to a 2010 article in California Home & Design.

    Designers of new vacation homes as well seek to mimic earlier generations’ use of Douglas-fir in new construction, while using reclaimed wood when possible to create a sense of history. A vacation house in Stinson Beach constructed in 2007 features reclaimed Douglas fir on the ceilings—boards that were originally part of the gymnasium at Stanford University, built in 1914 and deconstructed in 2004.

    In 2011, the California Home and Design award for residential architecture went to a mountain home in the Sugar Bowl, one of the oldest of California’s Lake Tahoe Ski Resorts. Hearkening back to early vacation home plans, designer John Maniscalco went for a simple, geometric design with extensive use of native materials—although this modern 3,000-plus square foot house is a far cry from those early do-it-yourself vacation homes. Narrow-planked Douglas fir covers the ceiling and huge windows frame the snowy, pine-dotted hillside surroundings.

    From tiny mountain A-frames to luxurious beachside getaways, Douglas fir continues to be prized by Californians as a material to make vacation homes as beautiful inside as the landscape outside.

    - Jennifer Rouse



    This post was posted in All Entries, History and Interest and was tagged with Douglas-fir, Douglas fir flooring, douglas fir floors, California vacation homes, douglas fir paneling

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