The floor
- Species
- Engineered European white oak, light rustic grade
- Board lengths
- 7 to 15 feet
- Width
- Wide plank
- Finish
- Custom stain mixed on site: one part rustic beige, two parts weathered oak, a quarter part ebony
- Builder
- John Kraemer & Sons
Long boards on a big floor
Six thousand square feet is a lot of floor, and in rooms that size the number of end joints decides whether a floor looks calm or busy. The boards on this job ran 7 to 15 feet, which cuts the joint count well below a standard-length plank and lets the eye run the length of the room. Light rustic grade keeps the knots, grain movement and color variation of the oak without going rough or busy. Engineered construction suits planks this long in a Minnesota house, where a solid board would move more across the seasons.
Mixing the stain on site
The color is a custom mix we built on site, one part rustic beige to two parts weathered oak with a quarter part ebony. The weathered oak does most of the work, cooling the natural yellow in white oak and pulling the floor toward a soft gray-brown. The rustic beige warms the base so it does not go flat, and the small amount of ebony settles into the grain and the knots so they read as character rather than disappearing into the field. The homeowner and builder signed off on the color from samples before we stained the house.
How the Wayzata white oak came out
A wide plank European white oak floor that runs long and quiet through the home, in a color that belongs to this house rather than a stock chart. Wayzata sits about 40 miles east of our shop on Highway 12, and this kind of wide plank white oak is what the new builds along Lake Minnetonka most often call for.
What this job involved
More about our hardwood floor work in Wayzata.