As you know, I'm renovating my house. No small project, even though its a small house. One of the benefits of doing everything yourself is that you can work with more unique or expensive materials since you are saving on the labor. What I can tell you is that I have expensive taste in wood species... One the up side is that I have access to piles of such wood due to my fathers pack rat nature, and not being able to pass up a bargin at an auction...
The floor in my living room is solid cherry. Now, before you think its that crappy pre-finished stuff, or the engineered crap with a veneer on it, shame on you... Solid cherry to me means solid cherry, and you have to install it, then sand and finish it... I'm sure the pre-finished stuff may hold up fine, but it hasn't survived the test of time in my book, and honestly, I know how well plywood holds up with age, so I'm just leery... I've seen hundred year old solid wood floors that look great, so that's the route I'm going...
The cherry I put down is quite old already... It's been sitting around the family farm for years, and we picked it up at an auction... So the real age is unknown... What is unique about this stack of flooring, is that it is various widths from 3" up to 7"... That make it a bit harder to put in, but I survived, and after 2.5 days of sanding (cherry laughs at floor sanders) and 3 layers of polyurethane, it looks fabulous... The next step is molding... Since the floor came out so nicely, I couldn't imagine putting anything but cherry molding up to finish the room...
Over the weekend, my dad planed down a pile of cherry planks we have in storage to 3/4". I brought them back to my shop, and I've now run them through the table saw on a sled to get a straight edge. (this lumber came straight from the mill, un-dressed, so I have bark on most edges, and it has warped a bit as it dried over the years...)
Next step is to slice it down to very close to the finished width, before running it through the jointer to get a nice square edge to work with on the router tables... (yea, it's basically square off the table saw, but it's not perfect due to some twist in the boards) Then off to the router tables to put the molding profile on the boards... Hopefully the router bits come in today, or tomorrow, and I can get rolling on that aspect...
After making rough lengths of molding, it goes to the house where it gets cut to finished length... I decided to use rosettes at the corners and plinths at the base of the door casings, which gets me off the hook from making perfect miter joints... (I happen to like the rosette look, and I can do the miters, but it is a pain to make them absolutely perfect) The molding will be attached to the walls using trim head screws (color matched of course) so I can remove the molding to both finish it, and to re-paint some day in the distant future.
Once cut, and dry fit with the screws, it will come back here to my shop to get probably 2 layers of gloss poly, and then a layer or two of satin. I like to put the gloss on as a sealer, and protectent, and then the satin takes the edge off the gloss. It you put lots of cotes of satin on, the grain looses some depth, and looks a bit washed out...
Then its back to the house to install...
After that comes the low voltage electrical (phone, cable, network, and speaker cable), after which I can finally move my living room in to the house from the garage... Oh how I miss my recliners...