# Rough cut boards as flooring



## wberry85 (Feb 28, 2013)

When I bought my house, the guy who lived here before me had a portable saw mill or something and he cut thousands of feet of lumber and stacked it in my pasture. Its great stuff!

So we want to use this lumber for our floors in our house. It s rough cut and varies slightly in thickness so I will of course need to plane it down. The dimensions are 1x10. Each board is around 10 ft long. I have been looking at small dewalt planers but with a 1x10 people are telling me the max it can do is 1/32" per pass and I have to do take maybe 1/4" off the thickness, maybe more. 

Anyone have experience with this?


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## Muleman (Nov 8, 2013)

unless you intend to spend big bucks on a high end planner, plan on making many passes only taking of a little. Especially with the smaller HP planners if you try to take too much even if it does not bogg it down it will be wavy. Now if you ripped them to where they were narrower it would certainly be easier, but when you are taking the maximum width cut, it will be slower. You did not mention what kind of wood it is, if it is a hardwood good luck if it is pine, you will probably have a bit easier time of it.


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## logbuilder (Jan 31, 2006)

I have a Dewalt 13" planer. What you are hearing is right about taking small passes. Take too deep of a pass and it is hard on the machine and you get ripples in the wood.

Also, if this wood has been in a pasture, be sure and clean off any dirt before planing. Since you have so much to do, it might also be a good idea to invest in a set of carbide blades.


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## Nimrod (Jun 8, 2010)

As mentioned, dirt will put nicks in the planer blades. So will knots. Select wood without knots.

I would toung and grove the edges so they stay even after they are laid. 

How long have the boards been drying while they are stacked in the pasture?? They need several years of air drying before they finish shrinking. I have a neighbor who laid his own floor from boards that had not finished drying. It has 1/4 inch gaps between the ends of the boards. 

The wider boards will tend to cup and warp after you take the weight off them so nail them down ASAP.

You want hardwood for a floor. It gets a lot of traffic and the hardwood will hold up better.


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## Farmerjonathan (Mar 11, 2013)

Also with rough cut you will need to trim the sides to make the board parallel. Do this first. Then figure how many boards you will need for the first room you plan on doing. Then add about 10 more boards to the pile. I have an older DeWalt planer and it has done hundreds of boardfeet of lumber. For the floor, you would only need to plane one side (put nice side up!). With the pile selected and a helper, start running your boards through the planer one at a time. Then when done, adjust the thickness of your planer and go through the board pile again. Taking little bites at a time sounds time consuming but remember the planer will be running at optimal speed though. Wear ear protection. It will be loud and mind numbing. Continue until the whole pile has one clean side and all have been through the planer. This reduces screwups as well as gets all boards to the same thickness at the same time. By trimming the sides making the boards parallel, you will be surprised at the amount of planing you reduce firsthand. It isn't a bad job, instantaneous proof of work being accomplished. Good luck.


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## fishhead (Jul 19, 2006)

Some people have built floors with rough sawn that still shows the circular cut. The thickness has to be uniform but once that is taken care of you might like the look of rough sawn.


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## kycrawler (Sep 18, 2011)

I am currently building a new house and am sawing 1x6 poplar and oak for subfloor boards I am putting them down green and expect shrinkage I am not planing mine any off thickness boards go in the pile for the hay mow floor in the barn we intend to install a floating laminate floor on top of the sub floor I am considering putting a layer of 15 lb roofing felt under the laminate floor but doubt it would serve much use


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## Wylie Kyote (Dec 1, 2009)

Do what you can with the planer/thicknessizer and finish off after you have laid the floor, with the nails punched below the surface with a floor sander. Should do the trick. I would not attempt to tongue and groove the boards, it could create problems if things don't fit right. I would run a saw groove each side of the boards, about 1/4 in. deep and put in nylon/acrylic yellow tongue as it is more flexible.

Wylie (retired Aussie builder)


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## Farmerjonathan (Mar 11, 2013)

On our floors and walls of knotty pine I didn't try to make tongue and groove either. I made ship lap joints. Basically using a dado blade on a table saw cut an L on one side of the board, flip it over and make and opposite L on the other long end. Doing this to each board and they will fit together tight and any shrinkage won't allow light or wind through.


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## badlander (Jun 7, 2009)

Don't know where OP is from but I would look around for an Amish owned saw mill and talk to them about planing down the wood and grooving it if necessary. We had torn down a corral to make room for an orchard only to discover that the planks were solid white oak. Nicely weathered and tough as tails. We had our neighbor who was a cabinet maker plane them and cut them to size to make boards to use as trim boards for our doors and windows. Cost a fraction of what it would cost in time and equipment to do it ourselves.


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## riggerjack (Apr 21, 2014)

I did my decks out of rough cut cedar 8/4. The first one, I just put the boards down. The slightly different widths of the boards bugged me, so the next one, I ran all the boards through my grizzly planer, to get them ALL the same width and thickness. When I'd stained all sides, I went to install them, and they were different sizes again. I don't know if it was different moisture content at planing or what, but I'm never building another deck with rough cut.
YMMV. Good luck.


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## texican (Oct 4, 2003)

I've got rough sawn flooring upstairs... if there's a little difference in heights, I've not noticed....

far as planing, I'd measure the smallest board, plane it just a wee bit, and the others down to that one.... no need to have some arbitrary standard flooring thickness...


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## 1shotwade (Jul 9, 2013)

Unless I missed it no one has mentioned "crowning". All floors will at some point change in moisture content. You may put down lumber that is 12% and 3 years from now the whole thing might be 16%. When this happens the boards will "curl edge to edge so if you have not crowned your lumber you will end up with some boards bowing upward with the crown and others curling downward leaving you with an uneven floor.It is important to keep your crown up on all boards.If you run them crown down they will"cup" and hold water etc that gets on the floor. 
I hope I explained this good enough.So anyway the crowning must come first to determine which side you need to plane.



Wade


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