Tongued and Grooved

It has been 60 years since the pine floorboards of the rear living room at my Mother in Law’s house have seen the light of day. 

As a newly married couple George and Maureen moved into the house in 1956. 

At that time the property was already well established having been built on land conveyed in 1920 from the Alexander Land, Property, Mortgage and Investment Company to a Charles Sweeting who is likely to have been the builder and with the first occupant being a Mr James Walker. 

The quality of the pitch pine floorboards is exceptional after all these years. 

No patching or splicing has been necessary which is quite remarkable given the potential for rot, decay and infestation notwithstanding general wear and tear from many hundreds of thousands of footfalls over the lifetime of the house. 

I have seen many a wooden floor in similarly aged property which has simply disintegrated from the influence of wet and dry rot and the munching activities of boring insects. The floorboards at Maureen's were laid in the traditional manner running across the room from passage side to the understairs and therefore with the supporting joists resting at the base of the rear external wall and under the middle partition wall between the two living rooms.

In this way the joist ends can be at risk from any dampness on the outside wall but I can say that from my jumping around on the floor there is no sign of weakness whatsoever. A perforated or weak joist is easily detected even without being seen. The first indication is a dull resonance and the second and confirming feature is when you find yourself falling through the rotten timber into the sub floor space. 

The original pine boards, to attain their durability, will have been allowed to become seasoned over a number of years in a timber yard or even the builders own workshop. The wood is beautifully grained and knotted unlike a lot of modern boards which have to be securely nailed down to prevent the poor quality timber twisting and warping. 

Of course, in the first quarter of the 20^th Century a full wall to wall carpet in a home was still something of a luxury. The necessity rather than the fashion was to paint or woodstain around the border of a room floor and have a carpet square centrally positioned. This had in fact been the practice more than two centuries before in even the most affluent households. 

Another popular measure was to overlay floorboards with linoleum or what was known as canvas, and this was usually done straight away in a newly built house. This action preserved the wood in fresh and new condition. 

There was a severe shortage of construction timber at the end of the 1914-1918 war and in a house that I owned which was built around 1919 this was evident in that the floorboards were of small section and likely to have been recycled from use as ammunition boxes.

The carpet, until today concealing the floorboards, cost £5 a square yard in 1956 which inflated to the present day would be around £87 and converted to metric the equivalent of £100 a square metre, the price of an exceptional hand made floor covering. 

If you take price as an indicator of quality then the old carpet will have been of the highest. It has certainly given good service in the house where Maureen and George brought up three children, and in that particular room which remains as the hub of life and hospitality. 

In the 1970’s it was a trend for floorboards to be exposed, stripped and varnished but this soon fell out of fashion with a return to soft furnishings in the next decade and more recently with laminate and real wood. The floorboards are certainly in suitable condition for this type of retro-finish and would require very little by way of cosmetic attention but the resultant noise and draughtiness is too much of a trade-off. 

The newly exposed floorboards at Maureen's do have some minor paint splashes in Corporation type green which my wife, who is now in her early 50’s and spent her formative years in the house, recalls as being the gloss finish to the old kitchen door. The painting of that door could have been one of the first household maintenance jobs carried out by the newly wed George upon taking up occupation in the desire to make the house into a home which it has been for well over a quarter of a century.

The old boards certainly have some stories to tell.