by bungalow101 | Jun 14, 2022 | Foundations & Masonry
Your bungalow’s foundation was the first thing to be built give or take, 100 years ago. It is still of primary importance. It bears the weight of your house & all its contents- your cast iron bathtub, your refrigerator, your bookshelf. If you live in a cold climate, it also bears the weight of winter snow, which weighs in at about 15 pounds per cubic foot.
In this article I am going to address what can adversely affect your foundation. I’m not enthusiastic about warning people about dangers without giving them solutions so I’m including what you can do to ensure that yours stays strong & level.
The ground beneath us moves often, shrinking during dryer times & expanding during wet ones, & does not move uniformly, causing damage to the supporting piers of your bungalow’s foundation.
STEPS TO TAKE TO PROTECT YOUR BUNGALOW’S FOUNDATION
1. Plant trees well away from your exterior walls. The Arbor Day Foundation recommends that you plant a medium (30’- 40’) tree at least 15’ away from a wall. A taller tree. Such as an oak, needs to be at least 20’. Most tree roots spread 2-3 times the radius of the canopy, & often reach out 5 times the radius of the tree canopy & in dry conditions, they can spread even further. As they grow, they disrupt the soil.
Some trees have more invasive roots, some that are water-seeking. Replacing a root-infested main drain pipe (which carries all the water from your house to the city connection or to your septic tank) typically requires excavation, which makes a mess in your yard & can be hideously expensive. Trees with invasive roots may need a minimum distance of 25 to 50’. Slow-growing trees generally have less destructive roots than those that grow quickly. Before you plant a tree, find out about how its root system will behave.
2. Take a deep breath!
Your foundation needs to breath. If water gets underneath your house, it must be able to dry out. A non-vented crawl-space is dangerous to your foundation & your floors. Read this article on how you can help it get some much needed air.
3. Remove dead trees, stumps & root systems from areas near the house. They attract termites & your bungalow, depending on wood beams to support it doesn’t need to be weakened by the gnawing of termites.
4. Install gutters. They channel rainwater from your roof to downspouts & keep your beds from getting washed out. But here’s the trick, you need to install gutter extenders or your gutter will pour all that water right onto your foundation. You need at least 8’ extenders to take that water away. This is most important if you live in a wet area, like I do in Florida, or during the rainy season even in a dryer climate. You can move the ends of the extenders around so that no one area is getting too much water, or, you can choose plants far from your house that would appreciate the extra soaking. I attached several together & put them on my bananas. My neighbors stopped answering their doors when I’d show up with yet more banana bread! You can get extenders at any big box hardware store, or even on Amazon. They are cheap, very easy to install & remove & take up little space in storage. Honest, you need them.
5. Be alert for leaks. If you suddenly find yourself with an unusually high water bill one month, get suspicious. Leakage can occur in any pipes, your water heater, your ice maker in your refrigerator- a biggy. In my 45 years in the wood flooring business, this was our most common repair.
6. Drainage lines can leak & create problems with you bungalow’s foundation too. We owned a house in which it was discovered that the shower was not hooked up to the sewage system. All the water drained under the house! We’d had the house “inspected” but this was not noticed & had been going on for decades.
Do not overlook the draining of your HVAC’s condensate lines. Under the indoor unit of your HVAC system, there sits a large metal pan. When you run your air conditioner, water collected from the air in the form of condensation will drip out of the unit & flow into the drain pan. From the collection pan, it flows into the drain line & then through a pipe & out your bungalow. You need to make sure that the drain line is not clogged or the pan will overflow, & you need to have that pipe long enough so that the water is not running out close to your house.
7. How is the grading around your house? Does water run away from or toward the foundation? Hopefully this was included in your inspection, but it can be overlooked. Notice where the water runs in a heavy rain.
8. If you find that you are having problems with water sitting under your bungalow, & you determine that your grading is tipped the wrong way, you can have French drains installed to move the water away from your bungalow’s foundation.
9. When you are doing your hardscaping or landscaping keep in mind the idea that you don’t want to build up your beds so that they are higher than the ground around your house, especially if you have raised borders that will trap rain or irrigation. You don’t want to be building little ponds around your 100 year old masonry piers! If you have raised borders, monitor your irrigation & use gutter extenders to keep heavy rain out of them.
10. Let’s talk about your irrigation system. My husband has been called to inspect homes which have developed cupped (wood) floors & found that the irrigation system was hitting the house. Even if it’s not directly hitting it, your sprinkler heads need to be pointed away from your bungalow’s foundation. It’s a good idea to inspect the system routinely to see if it has sprung any leaks that might be hitting your house or causing water to flow under the house.
11. Keep your plants away from your house. You need to be able to inspect your piers & peer underneath your house to see what’s going on every once in a while. (I never said home ownership is for sissies.)
12. Protect your bungalow’s foundation from termite damage. I’m going to toss you over to a Bora-Care video to tell you about the product. Then I’d like for you to watch a video on a more toxic product Sentricon.
I use both. I had the attic & crawlspace of my bungalow sprayed with Bora-Care & then I installed Sentricon at the perimeter. I don’t know why the Sentricon video presents it as an either/or situation. They each have their place your termite arsenal.
I was lucky to have discovered a wonderful home inspector whom I could call when I had things going on with my house that looked scary. He figured out why my bedroom wall was cracking (water under the house which is how I learned about gutter extenders) & he successfully tracked a leak missed by a bunch of leak detection guys at my friend’s house.
When you own a house & especially when you own a 100 year old bungalow, you need someone who knows more than you do that you can trust. A good inspector is worth her weight in gold before you purchase & as your home changes through the years.
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by bungalow101 | Jun 13, 2022 | Landscaping
Using native landscaping for your bungalow is eco-friendly, easier care & a beautiful complement to your house of natural materials.
“Everything made by man’s hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly; beautiful if it is in accord with Nature, & helps her; ugly if it is discordant with nature.” -William Morris, considered to be the founder of the Arts & Crafts Movement.
The Movement was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution which had generated new opportunities & economic growth, but also introduced pollution on a scale not yet experienced on our planet. As well, the increased production of materials demanded that we utilize our natural resources at an unprecedented pace.
Our environment is under even greater stress today. More & more species are becoming extinct. The Monarch butterfly was recently placed on the endangered list!
So how can we plant gardens to be, “beautiful if it is in accord with Nature, and helps her.” How can we be in accord with our natural world? By considering native landscaping for your bungalow.
WHY USE NATIVE LANDSCAPING FOR YOUR BUNGALOW?
The United States National Arboretum defines a native plant as “one that occurs naturally in a particular region, ecosystem, or habitat without direct or indirect human intervention.” And, how are they beneficial to our natural world?
The California Native Plant Society states, “These plants have coevolved with animals, fungi and microbes, to form a complex network of relationships. They are the foundation of our native ecosystems, or natural communities.”
This coevolution is the key. Evolution, in biology, is defined as the change in the characteristics of a species over several generations & may result in changes which give the individual an advantage in survival which they can then pass on to their progeny. Coevolution occurs when two species, or groups of species, evolve alongside each other, adapting to changes in the other, giving one another an advantage in survival. These changes could be caused by any source- climate, air & water quality, natural disasters such as fire, pathogens affecting any part of the group, etc. So here we have this nice little group of plants, animals, (including insects) fungi & microbes all working in harmony for the mutual survival of all, making adjustments every generation as together they fine tune their abilities to survive & multiply. It’s the ultimate in cooperation!
A prime example of this is the relationship between flowering plants & insects & birds that pollinate them. The flowering plants have developed adaptations that allow them to attract pollinators, & there is evidence that some flowering plants sweeten their nectar when they perceive the buzz of a bee. The insects and birds have also developed specialized adaptations for extracting nectar & pollen from the plants.
Flowers & their flitting pollinators were a common theme in the textiles & pottery of the Arts & Crafts Movement- bees, butterflies, birds. Life & its creations were considered precious in the Movement & the natural world with its beauty & vitality were exhaulted in their art.
IN THE FOREST, THE ULTIMATE NATIVE GARDEN
Suzanne Simard
a descendant of loggers, now a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, is one of the first women in the industry & has made some monumental discoveries about the wisdom of trees. In an interview on NPR she states, “Keep in mind that all trees and all plants — except for a very small handful of plant families — have obligate relationships with these fungi. That means that they need them in order to survive and grow and produce cones and have fitness — in other words, to carry their genes to the next generations. And the fungi are dependent on the plant or the trees … because they don’t have leaves themselves [for photosynthesis]. And so they enter into this symbiosis in that they live together in the root, and they exchange these essential resources: carbohydrates from the plant for nutrients from the fungus, in this two-way exchange which is very tight, almost like a market exchange.
If you give me five bucks, I’ll give you five bucks back. It’s very, very tightly regulated between those two partners in the symbiosis. But, yes, all trees and all plants in all of our forests around the world are dependent on this relationship.”
Now look at this over a span of millions of years. Generation after generation of trees are assisted by beneficial fungi which, in turn, feed on their fallen sisters. Every generation their abilities are expanded & their bonds strengthened.
PLEASE CONSIDER NATIVE LANDSCAPING FOR YOUR BUNGALOW
It is plain to see that life supports life. Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest missed the important point that the fittest are the most cooperative. Cooperation is a natural activity, though we see far too many examples in which it is lacking. My grandmother was a farmer’s daughter & a rosarian, but foremost, she was a teacher. In turn I learned about trees & gardens from my mother. My brother is a Master Gardener. Gardening with your children & grandchildren provides an opportunity to teach them about living in cooperation with their fellows & with our Earth.
As a gardener, you can contribute to this circle of life by planting natives. Your climate- temperature, rainfall, seasonal changes- is already in place for it. The make-up of your soil – clay, sandy, silty, peaty, chalky or loamy- is already there. The microbes that were there 100 years ago which developed to assist the indigenous plants are disturbed but you can coax them back to health by planting the species that were at home in your area for hundreds of years, themselves evolving to support the survival of the native microbes.
Planting species indigenous to your area, utilizes all the environmental conditions to their greatest effect because they evolved under these conditions. Their pollinators will return. Your plants will like ‘em & they will thrive with little fuss from you!
Please visit Wild Ones because they can help you get started. These wonderful folks provide resources for purchasing native plants, native garden plans, webinars- pretty much anything that you might need to get started with your new adventure in native landscaping for your bungalow. You can also call your local County Extension Service for advice & if you need help in figuring out which plants would be most attractive with your color scheme, this article on color basics will help.
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by bungalow101 | May 28, 2022 | Wood floors
by Dennis Prieur, 40 year veteran of the wood flooring industry, writes about how to decide when to refinish the wood floors in your bungalow.
Dennis was a 25 year member of the National Wood Flooring Association where he sent his craftsmen for certification & was himself an NWFA Certified Sales Consultant. Popular speaker at Historic Homes Workshop. Supporter of my preservation activities from writing the checks to drying the tears & celebrating the victories. All around wonderful person.
The first floor I ever refinished was in 1981. It was in a bungalow near downtown Phoenix. I went to the library and read books about how to refinish floors. The floor was maple, notoriously difficult to stain, but I didn’t know any of this and just sanded away with the equipment rented from Home Depot, using the stain and finishes I got from the paint store. I have a background in chemistry, which helped, but otherwise, I was just wingin’ it!
Since then, I have refinished or supervised the refinishing well over 1,000 historic floors. My aim was always to preserve and protect historic materials, beyond making pretty floors. The old growth forests are long gone and their beautiful wood will never be available again.
So here’s the important question- Do your wood floors really need refinishing?
THIS ARTICLE IS FULL OF TECHNICAL TERMS. PLEASE USE OUR GLOSSARY IF YOU RUN INTO ANY WORDS THAT ARE NEW OR UNFAMILIAR TO YOU.
The first thing I’d like to do is to help you establish if your floors should be sand and refinished, if they can be sanded, or if they should just be cleaned and left as-is. I will also discuss recoating as an option for floors in relatively good condition, or where further sanding is not possible.
MAYBE, MAYBE NOT!
The original wood of bungalow floors is what is termed, old-growth wood. This wood is from the ancient forests that were here when our country was first settled. The forests were clear-cut to near extinction by the beginning of the 20th Century. Old-growth wood is denser, tends to be darker and is much richer in appearance than the wood that is harvested today. It is to be treasure and preserved.
Consequently, old-growth wood floors need to be sanded down to raw wood and refinished only when they are heavily worn, and the wear includes one of two factors. The first, is dents or deep gouges into the wood. If you aren’t sure, get on your knees and run a fingernail into the dent. If it catches, and seems more than 1/32”, it is a scratch into the wood and will only be removed by sanding the wood floors. Scratches that stay in the finish layer are generally 1/64” or less. A floor with this lesser type of surface scratches and abrasions, or where the sheen has worn off, can be recoated (described below) without a full sanding. The other factor, requiring a floor to be sanded, is where the finish has worn off in some or many areas and dirt is worn into the grain of the wood. Wood is a soft and porous material, so leaving it unprotected causes your bungalow wood floor to degrade with traffic.
A wood color change requires a full floor re-sanding (with one possible exception discussed in the recoating section below). However, wood floors in your bungalow (and houses built earlier) were traditionally finished to a natural wood color with no stain. Although it is possible to change the color and stain older floors, please consider that this color change will change the character of your home, and move you away from an original look. Additionally, it will shorten the life of your floor, buzzing away that beautiful, irreplaceable, old-growth wood.
One time where a color change is often required, with older wood floors, is where there is significant wood discoloring due to water stains and pet urine stains. Water and urine stains are usually quite dark. The discolored boards need to be removed and replaced, if you want a natural color refinish. If there are just a few discolored areas, you may choose to live with these age marks. Bleaching isn’t a good solution. It lightens most stains, but doesn’t bring the wood back to the look of the rest of the floor. Also, bleach- no matter how carefully applied- will wick and spread past the discolored wood and lighten un-discolored boards. You end up with 3 shades- the look of the undamaged wood, the lightened boards that were discolored, and a thin band of bleached wood that separates these areas. Additionally, the boards’ integrity is already compromised by the damaging water and more so by pet stains which are usually quite acidic. Bleach or even hydrogen peroxide can further degrade the boards decreasing their strength. This is not such an issue when there’s a nice subfloor underneath, but you want to protect the boards of a floor that is laid directly over joists so that they remain strong & safe.
PATCHING YOUR BUNGALOW WOOD FLOOR
Boards can be replaced so the patching is almost invisible. Ideally, this is done with salvaged, matching, old-growth wood flooring boards. This is best left to a professional who knows how to match wood color and grain. Red oak used to patch a white oak floor stands out badly. Newly harvested white oak used to patch a 100 year old floor also stands out and will be much lighter in color and usually coarser in grain. I commonly see the wrong wood species used to patch floors, and even boards of a wider or narrower width. All floor repairs should be done with tongue and groove flooring materials. When we patch an old white oak floor, and don’t have old salvaged flooring, we select and use only tight, straight grained pieces and stain them after installation for a better match to the historic wood floor.
The most important point is that on a floor with no subfloor, the new pieces need to be placed so that their ends nail to the joists. We have discovered boards or sections of boards hanging in air, waiting for the exactly placed heavy step or the new piano to cause them to fail. Old joists are usually at least 1 & ¾” wide. We end the repair halfway over a joist on both sides so it is supported well.
INSPECTING A BUNGALOW WOOD FLOOR
Here is what I do when I inspect a wood floor that a homeowner wants to refinish. I first notice whether the floors were installed directly over the floor joists, or over a subfloor that is nailed onto the joists. The easiest way to tell this from the floor surface is to look for the butt ends of boards. A floor nailed to the joists will generally have all board butt ends over the floor joists. Joists are normally 16” apart, but can be 2’ or even wider on very old floors. If you look across a floor and see that the butt joints line up in these spaced intervals, there is no subfloor. A wood floor over a wood subfloor will have randomly staggered butt ends, since all boards are laid over a layer of solid wood which creates stability.
Another way to tell whether you have a subfloor, is to go into the crawl space under your house and look up. A wood subfloor under your wood subfloor is normally laid at a 45 degree angle to the wood floor, but can occasionally be at a 180 degree angle. While under the house, see the direction of the floor boards nailed on the joists. If they are the same as the surface wood floor, and are the same width, you are seeing the bottom of the wood floor that has been installed directly on the joists. Subfloor boards were normally around 5 & ½” wide or occasionally wider. Finished wood flooring in older homes was most often 3” or less in width. Another way to tell, from the surface, is that a floor laid over the joists with no subfloor, almost always has much more movement and sag than a floor nailed to a separate subfloor. You also might notice cracks through which you can see daylight!
IS MY WOOD FLOOR TOO THIN TO SAND?
Next, I want to see how much wood remains from the surface of a board, down to the tongue and groove. Newly installed wood floors had around ¼” of wood to the tongue. A wood floor needs at least 1/8” between the surface and the top of the tongue to be sanded. (Some wood flooring professionals often can and will resand a floor that is slightly under 1/8”, but you will have to live with some defects.)
One way I determine this depth is to look for boards with gaps on the sides, wider than the thickness of a credit card. On my hands and knees, I slide a credit card down and measure with my thumbnail about how far down the card goes before it hits the tongue. I check several boards in different areas to get an average depth to the tongue. (If you get a depth over ¼” you may have a section that has no tongue and your card will go down to hit the sub floor.) Oak and other hardwood floors normally have a tongue and groove on all sides of the flooring boards, however, many older softwood floors (like pine or fir) do not have tongue and grooves on the butt joints, just on the two long sides.
It’s best to measure on the long edges of the boards. I will check butt ends if I find no other wide gaps. but know that if my card goes down almost ¾” that there is no tongue here and that there is no way to tell if the floor can be sanded from this spot.
If the thin section of wood above the tongue is thinner than 1/8”, it will often start to crack and split off when sanded, leaving a ¼” wide gap and exposing the tongue. These gaps can be filled if there is a subfloor, but this won’t look great and the filler usually won’t stay in well. If you have a floor laid over the floors with no subfloor, a floor is potentially dangerous when sanded too thin, and your foot may go through the boards.
The second method to check wood thickness to determine if the floors can be re-sanded, is to look for exposed nails in the joint between two boards. All wood floors had a tongue and groove on the length of the boards and were generally “blind nailed” by positioning the nail at a slant and nailing on top of the tongue to secure it to the joist or the subfloor. (See diagram.)
When a floor has been sanded many times and there is 1/8” or less from the board surface to the top of the tongue, you will see some exposed nail heads between two boards. These nail holes must be between two boards for this to be a valid test of wood thickness. Here’s why- many older wood floors may have been top nailed to “handle” squeaks or loose boards. Also, in certain areas of the Western United States, old wood floors had no tongue and groove. They were top nailed. These nails are never at the edges of the boards, and you will see a regular, repeating pattern, if you have these floors.
If you do have some nails showing between the boards, a wood flooring professional may still determine your floor can be sanded. Sometimes, these nails can be set down and filled, which will be visible in the finished floor. If small finish nails were used to lay the floor, it looks better to leave them and just sand the floors. You will see these exposed nail heads, but the floors will still look great. I have sanded many floors where homeowners had previously been told they could not be sanded again, to great result. If I find that the floor is borderline to resand (less than 1/8” wood remaining above the tongue and groove) I discuss the options. Usually a refinish can be done that will make the floors look amazing, even if some age related blemishes exist. However, some floors cannot be resanded. I always let a homeowner know what I think can be done, and what he can expect to achieve.
RECOATING YOUR BUNGALOW WOOD FLOOR
This is a good option for any wood floor that isn’t too badly worn. A recoat allows the finish coats to be renewed for a great improvement in appearance. It works well for a floor that is too thin to be resanded but can be aesthetically improved and be better protected by a recoat. One to two coats are all that is ever needed.
The wood floor must be properly prepared before any coats are done. This is normally done using a light duty stripper designed to remove wax, oils, and other household cleaning products that may have been applied to the floor. Follow the recommendations of your selected finish manufacturer for how to do this, and what product to use. If this step is omitted, the finish often will adhere poorly to the old finish, and either peel off or scratch easily. Once you have a peeling recoat, a full resanding is normally the only solution.
After any cleaning and prep work are done, the floors are normally lightly sanded using a floor buffer and a sanding screen, clog-resistant nylon discs in 80-120 grit. Always follow the grain and direction of the floorboards. The floor is then vacuumed and tacked down well, and is ready for your recoat.
Apply the 1-2 coats per manufacturer instructions for the finish you are using. Also, follow dry time and abrasion instructions if a second coat is planned, and to determine when you can walk on and use the floors.
A recoat doesn’t remove anything in the wood, so you will see any dents, deep scratches, and discoloration on the floor after the recoat is done. If your floor is too thin to sand, a recoat will always improve the appearance, but may not be satisfactory for a badly worn floor that could have been sanded.
CHANGING THE COLOR WITHOUT RE-SANDING
An American Company, Basic Coatings, has developed a product called HyperTone stain. These are water-based floor finishes with tint added, in 14 different colors. They are designed to be used as undercoats followed by 2 coats of their Professional Street Shoe water-based finish. Tricky to use, they can give a blotchy look, but when done correctly, change the color of a floor and look great. Their main drawback is that they will cover up some of the grain and color variation of your original bungalow floors, which is why I recommend these only for a floor that is too thin to resand. But what I most recommend is to leave your floors stain free.
OTHER OPTIONS
Bob Yapp of Belevedere School offers other options. I’m going to let him tell you about them. Bob is a giant in the world of historic preservation & if you want to learn how to restore your own floors, he will teach you!
REFINISHING YOUR BUNGALOW FLOORS: SUMMARY
Original wood floors were milled from trees from our old-growth forests. They have a luminous and lively appearance that is not present in wood that is farmed, harvested and milled today. The old trees were often hundreds of years old when they were cut. Grown naturally, they may show as many as 10 times the number of growth rings per inch. In addition to being more beautiful, this wood is more dense and more pest and decay resistant and also shows greater stability, meaning that tt is less likely to warp.
The purpose of finish is to preserve the wood, a soft and porous material underneath. We urge you to forgo sanding if your floor has a good, protective coat on it. If it is showing little wear, we encourage recoating rather than re-finishing. Once your floor is ground down to the tongue and groove, it is effectively over, especially if you have no subfloor to support weight on the thin boards.
A floor that is properly cared for will last several hundred years. The old growth forest will never come again. The supply of wood from them is finite. Let’s protect what we have.
TIP: READ OUR ARTICLE ABOUT WOOD FLOORING FINISH CHOICES HERE.
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by bungalow101 | May 28, 2022 | Other areas, Wood floors
by Dennis Prieur (usually known as Hubby) & Carol Goodwin, of the Goodwin Heart Pine Company
Heart pine floors in bungalows is one of the most appreciated features of our charming homes here in the South, where they are deservedly revered. They gleam a warm welcome as you come in the door, bringing an element of the natural world into the built environment. But what is “heart pine?”
Carol Goodwin of Goodwin Company has been working with heart pine since 1976. They pride themselves with being an eco-friendly company, rescuing logs or using only wood that has been sustainably harvested throughout the Southeast.
Goodwin Heart Pine is famous for its recovery & milling of pine logs from the bottoms of the rivers on which they were floated to the mills over 100 years ago. If you should need extensive patching of your floor, or wish to add an area, they can provide the material for you that will match the existing.wood in your house. This is a terrific video about how they recover the logs.
Carol is a lover and student of history and a supporter of historic preservation. One of my favorite projects of theirs was an adaptive re-use of a barn built in the 1930’s for which they provided over 2,000 square feet of reclaimed wood.
HEART PINE FLOORS IN BUNGALOWS
The “heart” of the pine tree is the solid, inside core of the tree. It contains no sap, the watery fluid that circulates through the tree, carrying nutrients to the leaves and various tissues. Heartwood is wood that has died with age. As the tree grows, more heartwood is formed. The heartwood becomes more resistant to decay and termites as a result of genetically programmed chemical changes in the wood, causing the clogging of the nutrient tubes with resin and pitch. If you were to cut a cross section of a tree, you would see heartwood as a darker colored circle, usually following the annual rings in shape.
True heart pine floors in your bungalow are only from the long leaf pine, also known as long needle, long straw, southern yellow, hard, pitch, heart pine and Georgia pine, among other names. The natural range of longleaf pine extends from southeastern Virginia to east Texas in a belt approximately 150 miles wide adjacent to the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. It dips as far south as central Florida and widens northward into west central Georgia and east central Alabama. This type of pine is called “heart” because when it reaches maturity the tree is mostly heartwood, taking 200 years for a tree to become 2/3 heartwood.
Long leaf heart pine contains almost twice the resin content of other types of pine and has much higher structural strength. It was used for the tall masts of sailing ships and was referred to as “The Kings Pine” when this country was owned by England.
HEART PINE- OUR COUNTRY’S BACKBONE
Heart pine is generally considered to be timber from first generation trees, trees that were standing when the first settlers landed in this country in the 1600s. Many of these trees had been standing for over 300 years! There were approximately 80,000,000 acres of these trees. This wood was the primary building material for our bungalows and factories here in the South and was shipped to the Northeast and Europe as well. It was abundant, hard, straight, and long and its timbers offered excellent resistance to decay.
The economy of the Southeast centered on the export of longleaf pine products. After the Revolutionary War, intense cutting of the virgin longleaf pine timber began on the Atlantic seaboard and moved inland, then southward, increasing with the development of the railroad system in the late 1800’s.
By 1930 virtually all of the virgin longleaf pine forest succumbed to overcutting. Less than 1,000 acres of virgin timber remains today, with the longleaf pine ecosystem covering less than 3.3 million acres, a greater than 96% loss. The pine forests of the South have been cut several times over and this newly harvested wood exhibits very few of the qualities that made heart pine the wood of choice up until the early 20th century.
Read more about old growth forests here.
GROWING OLD GRACEFULLY
The heart pine floors of our bungalows are a mix of pine heart and sap woods. The heart is a deeper red in color, with the sapwood being lighter. Some of the boards are a mix of these two woods producing a stripy effect.
Sadly, some of our bungalow heart pine floors have been chewed by termites, and are at the ends of their lives. However, many have generations of usefulness left in them with some patching (think spare wood in closets, or a quick call to Carol!) and a gentle refinishing. We happen to think that they look beautiful when showing the patina of age, like any other precious antique. When possible, we prefer just to re-coat them with a new layer of finish which protects the wood from wear. A well maintained floor can be enjoyed for at least another 100 years!
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by bungalow101 | May 25, 2022 | Paint
THE COLOR LESSON
This is a lesson in choosing the right bungalow paint colors, which can be a huge challenge. Most articles give you a few examples, & the paint manufactureres provide pitifully few Arts & Crafts combinations, but they don’t actually teach you anything about the design history of bungalows or about the use of color to best enhance your home. If you want to learn the how & the why of color choices, stick around & read my series of articles, & then you’ll be able to figure it out for yourself & have a custom color scheme, based on your favorite colors, that you will love.
Read in the order they are presented. Each one builds upon the ones previous.
I’m going to start the choosing bungalow colors lesson with some basic terms, so basic that some of you may know them, but have patience, gentle readers, some may not. If you run into a term in a definition that you don’t know, look for it on the list. If it’s not there, let me know so that I can add it. In this part, the list is in teaching order, with images, so that the concepts build, one to the next. You can use this as a glossary in the next articles that will cover more complex colors, explain the Arts & Crafts palette & the final one of choosing colors for your own bungalow.
choosing bungalow colors lesson
CHOOSING BUNGALOW COLORS- THE BUILDING BLOCKS LESSON
Color
A quality of an object which is caused due to the light being reflected by this object.
Color wheel
A tool that shows every color in the full range of colors, by gradients.
Hue
A true color with no white, grey or black added.
Primary Colors
The building blocks of color- red, yellow, blue. These colors & are cheerful & great for kids’ toys.
Secondary Colors
Combining 2 primary colors in equal amounts gives you green, orange, violet. I’m actually not sure where this combination would work!
Tertiary Colors
Combining different amounts of the 2 primary colors- gives you red-orange, red-violet, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-violet, blue-green. I love this combination of hippy colors!
Remember that at the turn of the last century, they were still using natural materials as tints, so these plastic colors would not have even been possible to create. I’m thinking, let’s keep going so we don’t embarrass this poor house!!!
You can mix tertiary colors to achieve different colors. The closer that different colors are on the color wheel, the more compatible they are, and the more intense the resulting color will be when the colors are mixed. The further they are, the more muted & less intense they will be.
CHOOSING BUNGALOW COLORS-THE COLOR GROUPS LESSON
Cool/Water Colors
Do not include any red. Cool colors do include green, blue, & purple, & variations of those three colors. Blue is the only primary color within the cool spectrum. Greens take on some of the attributes of yellow, & purple takes on some of the attributes of red. As pastels, they can be more subdued than warm colors, but can be more vivid in the jewel tones.
Cool colors tend to be soothing & calming, like a trickling brook.
Warm/Fire Colors
Do not include any blue. Warm colors are of orange, red, yellow, & combinations of these. They tend to make you think of warm things, such as sunlight, fire, heat & friendliness.
Visually, warm colors look as though they come closer, or advance which is why they’re often used to make large rooms feel smaller & cozier. I think that this example may raise my blood pressure a little.
Pastels
These are colors which have white added to them. They can be primary, secondary or tertiary. Happy Easter!
Jewel Tones
Any deep or vivid color suggestive of that of a gemstone; ruby, emerald, sapphire, amethyst, etc. I have actually seen bungalows painted in these wild colors. I live in Florida & I don’t mind them on a Key West style house. .
Earth Tones
A group of colors that contain brown, the color of earth or soil. In its larger sense, (& how it will be used here) is colors that are found in nature- soil, grass, trees, berries, flowers, the sky, clouds, the sun. Though we’re not there yet, I find these colors pleasing & the house looks like it’s on friendly terms with the bushes. Well, not these bushes. They’re too bright. Use more subtle plantings, please.
Neutral Colors
Colors that are not found on the color wheel such as gray, beige and brown. Neutral colors are muted shades that appear to lack color but often have underlying hues that change with different lighting. The lighter ones can reflect the colors around them. Though not on the color wheel, they complement primary and secondary colors.
Neutral colors can be complex in tone, as mixing different colors creates unique shades. For example, greige is a mix of light gray and beige, with yellow hues in natural light and gray in fluorescent lighting. (Natural light refers to lighting generated from a natural source like the sun.)
I do not mind an all-neutral palette for a bungalow, but landscaping must be planned to liven it up a little, without overwhelming, & make it look more an extension of nature.
A key issue in color is paint quality.I always recommend Ben Moore because their paints are easy to apply & long lasting. Their colors are well formulated so they are clear & vibrant, they have a great website so that you can search & try colors on a photo of your house, & their customer service is some of the finest in the land.
We are getting closer, but there are still more things to consider before we’re fully submerged in the Arts & Crafts palette.
STEP ON OVER TO PART 2 , COLOR HARMONY, HERE.
STAY IN THE BUNGALOW KNOW!!!
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