Imagine it\u2019s 1830, in the Mid-Atlantic of the United States.\nYou are building a house. And you need to lay a floor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You could install plywood\u2026but that won\u2019t be invented until\n1865. You could order boards from your local lumber yard\u2026but those aren\u2019t in widespread\nexistence yet, and standardization of lumber products won\u2019t occur until the\n1920\u2019s. If you\u2019re lucky, you might have a sawmill nearby\u2026 a fairly rare thing in\nagrarian and frontier communities\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s assume you can score some boards from a local mill, or\nthere\u2019s an old barn you can take the boards out of, or in a pinch you could\nhand-mill some boards right at your job site. Chances are they won\u2019t all match\nin terms of wood species, or quality, or width or length or thickness. So you\njust gather together whatever you can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next thing you might do is improve your boards with\ntongue-and-groove edging so they hold together better. But you don\u2019t own a router,\nso you\u2019ll have to hand-cut those edges yourself. And no matter how good a\ncarpenter you are, there will be variations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which means that when you lay that floor down and nail it\ninto place, it\u2019s\u2026meh. There are different colors. There are gaps. There are\nknot holes. There are loose spots. And you don\u2019t have wood putty, or an orbital\nsander to grind everything smooth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hang on! You can cover it all over with carpeting. Heck,\nthey\u2019ve been weaving carpet in Philadelphia for, like, a decade or two. Unfortunately,\nthe price of that is pretty cost-prohibitive. And as for a fine area rug?\nThat\u2019s definitely not in most folks\u2019 price range, unless they are lucky enough\nto have inherited one from a rich uncle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What you CAN do is paint it. Just go down to the Sherwin-Williams\nstore and\u2026wait 36 years for them to invent canned paint. Or you could make some\nup yourself: mix up a combination of milk, linseed oil, and a little tar. As\nfor color, you\u2019ve got only two basic color palettes to choose from. You can\nmake red by mixing in some iron oxide (rust), which yields a range of colors\nfrom brown to bloody. Or you can make much more expensive blue tones by mixing\nin patinaed copper, yielding colors like turquoise, or the famous Prussian blue\nwhich George Washington used at Mount Vernon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rust is lot easier to get than copper \u2013 have you seen many old\nbarns painted blue? \u2013 so you go for red. And if you\u2019re lucky, your red turns\nout to be a nice bold color.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Congratulations, you\u2019ve laid a pretty nice red floor. And if you time-travel from 1830 to 2019, you find it has held up pretty well. As part of a post-fire renovation, your floor has been re-exposed, after lying hidden under wall-to-wall carpeting and plywood for\u2026a very long time. It looks pretty darn good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(Yep, we found an old red floor as we were renovating the\nAsa Hunt House. Truth be told, it\u2019s unlikely the floor is original to our house;\nit\u2019s probably a reproduction from the 20th<\/sup> century. But since fine\nunpainted wood floors – so common today – are a product of the Industrial\nRevolution, we think we\u2019re gonna keep it and be historically accurate-ish. We\nmay cheat by repairing and sanding it first, but it\u2019ll get a coat of red paint,\nand be as good as 1830.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Imagine it\u2019s 1830, in the Mid-Atlantic of the United States. You are building a house. And you need to lay a floor. You could install plywood\u2026but that won\u2019t be invented until 1865. You could order boards from your local lumber yard\u2026but those aren\u2019t in widespread existence yet, and standardization of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1544,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/IMG_1524.jpg?fit=2016%2C1512&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1543"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1545,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543\/revisions\/1545"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}