What We Do: Hand-Scraped Woods

When wood is scraped we are actually sheering the grain of the wood rather than tearing the grains open like sanding machines do. Since wood is naturally three dimensional, using a steel edge to scrape the wood defines the grains, enhances the depth and creates areas to retract light. This cannot be done with a flat sanded floor. The scraping process starts with beveling the edges of each board and defining the grains & knots within each strip. The amount of overall character produced can be very minimal to very distressed. An additional benefit to a hand-scraped floor is that “bumps & bruises” on the floor add to the over all character, rather than standing out as is the case in flat-sanded floors.
 

What We Do :: Burnished Woods

Once the wood has been hand-scraped, we typically burnish oils into the wood rather than coat the wood with polyurethane. Burnishing wood is a polishing process that heats the surface of the wood. When the wood is heated, it loses water within the pores of the grain causing them to begin to close. The oil is then forced into the layers of the wood with a buffer rather than being applied to the top of the wood. This method of finishing hardwood replicates processes used years ago when coating floors. This also allows wider width hardwood to continue to “breathe” through the burnished oil as opposed to being sealed under polyurethane.