Hand-scraped wooden floors are all the rage. Again.
One hundred years ago, carpenters scraped wooden floorboards as smoothly as they could by hand. The fewer scrapes, the better, although every floor wore its contractor’s marks. Then along came electric floor-sanding machines that made wooden floors as smooth as ice.
Now, homeowners want hand-scraped floors again. And they are paying big bucks to get them.
“There are no official statistics but I can say the distressed category of wooden floors, which includes hand-scraped, is increasing,” reports Tim Locke, executive vice president of NOFMA: The Wood Flooring Manufacturers Association.
Putnam-based installer Michael Dittmer credits the popularity of the Old World look for spurring the growth of scraped floors. “That’s where it started,” he says. “But now we’re putting them in houses of all styles, including contemporary. Now clients tell me they want the ‘worn but not too worn’ look.”
Although manufacturers’ labels vary, from “hand-crafted” to “hand-sculpted,” there are basically three types of scraped floors.
The true hand-scraped floor is scraped by the contractor on his hands and knees after the floor is installed but before it is sealed with polyurethane. Purists are willing to pay the premium for this because the scrapes are random. It runs $12 or more per square foot, installed.
The machine-scraped floor often passes as hand-scraped but is actually scraped by a machine at a factory before installation. It typically arrives pre-stained and sealed. It costs less than the true scraped, but the purist can see a pattern in the scrapes. This costs $8 to $12 a square foot, uninstalled.
Engineered hand-scraped, at about $7 to $11 a square foot, uninstalled, is the least expensive and is factory-scraped too. Unlike a solid-wood floorboard, the engineered floorboard is a sandwich of several layers of wood bonded together. It, too, arrives pre-finished.
Then there are cross-breeds, such as Armstrong’s Homerwood, which is delivered finished but is hand-scraped by Amish craftsmen prior to finishing. It runs about $15 to $18 a square foot, uninstalled.
In addition, laminate flooring manufacturers are introducing designs that mimic scraped wooden floors. Examples are Armstrong’s Rustics Collection and Wilsonart’s Red Label Hand Scraped Collection. Manufacturers such as Wilsonart also have laminate floors in a distressed finish.
The most economical scraped floors are made with domestic species such as walnut, maple or hickory. But suppliers are adding imported species, often labeled as “exotics.” “Everyone wants something different,” says Armstrong spokesperson Michele Zelman. “But there is a trend away from oak, which has dominated wood floors for so long.”
The wider the floorboard and the more exotic the species of wood, the more expensive the floor. Scraped floors are usually sold in 4- to 6-inch-wide planks. (The industry uses the term “plank” to describe floorboards 3 inches or wider and “strip” for those less than 3 inches wide.)
Chicagoan Kelly Drumm and his wife, Phyllis, chose Santos mahogany for the new, scraped floors that cover most of their three-story home.
Their contractor, Tim Golden of Golden Age Industries in Kouts, Ind., used 5-inch-wide planks that he hand-scraped and finished in his shop prior to installation.
The result is a floor that is elegant but tough. “We have three kids and a big dog, so it takes a beating,” Kelly Drumm says. “But you can’t tell.”
At the high end of custom-scraped floors are those installed by Birger Juell Ltd. in Chicago. It uses wider (up to 13 inches) and longer (up to 16 feet) planks.
Long before the hand-scraped trend caught on, Juell was making these floors for customers who had seen the Real McCoys in old, European houses.
“Now we’re seeing it move down to mid-range houses too,” reports Juell salesman Aaron Lindstrom. “A customer might not be able to afford it in the whole house but puts the custom floor in a special room such as a library or great room.”
Juell’s perennial best-seller is the company’s “heavy character” walnut. It has a rustic look with large knots. But customers choose everything from bleached oak (for a “weathered-fence look,” Lindstrom explains) to spalted maple that looks like the grain is highlighted with ink.
Whatever the look, scraped wooden floors are finding their way into every room of the house, although manufacturers recommend using the engineered variety in basements, where the floor is applied directly to concrete.
“It is more dimensionally stable, so it doesn’t expand and contract with temperature changes as much as solid wood does,” Zelman explains.
Solid or engineered are OK in kitchens and half-baths, where water spillage is minimal, but not recommended for full baths, where bathtub overflows warp the wood.
Most installers finish the scraped floors as they would non-scraped floors, with coats of polyurethane. One exception is Juell, which oils and waxes its floors. In both cases, dry-mopping or damp-mopping is the best way to clean them, with minimal exposure to water.
In addition to installing new scraped floors, contractors report that some customers with existing wooden floors opt for the scraped look.
Diana Carlson of Ottawa hired Dittmer to scrape her existing, 3 1/2-inch, white oak floors that had arrived new in 1991 as pickled. Dittmer sanded off the pickled finish, stained them a chestnut brown and hand-scraped them on site.
“I added some `worm holes’ with an electric drill,” Carlson adds. Then Dittmer applied coats of polyurethane.
Toenail scrapes from her Labrador retriever, Carlson says, “blend right in.”
Yes, scraping her floor costs more than would just doing the conventional stripping, staining and sealing.
But Carlson says it was worth it. In addition to rescuing her house from the pickling era, it gave her floor an old look that’s new again.
