Silly Government. You Can’t Take My Babies.

So, it seems someone among you thought I was neglecting my blog. Not updating it often enough. And so you decided to sic the Government on me for Hardwood Neglect.

Yeah, that’s cool. Thanks for that.

Well, your little plan backfired. For a number of reasons. First of all, as you can see from the picture above, my hardwood flooring loves me. Prefinished Cumaru, Engineered Brazilian Cherry, Prefinished Flamewood and I go on roller coasters, we paint mustaches on things that ought not be mustachioed, and we have had important talks pertaining to adolescent topics that need to be addressed for their safety and health as saplings.

Second of all, when the Feds come for my hardwood babies? I go Jason Bourne on their bureaucratic behinds. As you can again see from the photo, me and my babies are on the road, on the run. That didn’t just happen out of the blue. When the agents came to the door, I invited them in for tea. Then I went to the bathroom. I let loose my tell-tale clicking code to my hardwood babies that means “The Feds are here trying to take you away from me and now we are borrowing Kevin Bacon’s Lear jet to escape from their clutches.”

Once we had rallied in the back yard, unbeknownst to the agents, Kevin told me from the other end of the horn that he didn’t know who I was.

Kind of shows you who your friends are when the chips are down.

Instead, we all hopped in our Rocket Powered Radio Flyer, blew the fence door open with the force of our momentum, and flew down the suburban streets, bidding goodbye to our peaceful life of mustache painting and roller coastering and hurtling towards a world of box cars, smores, Kumbaya sing-alongs, and sleeping with switch blades. (Switch blades are also handy during the sing-alongs, which kind of kills the vibe.)

Nomadic life hasn’t been all bad. Cumaru and Flamewood sometimes pick on Engineered Brazilian Cherry because he’s engineered and a little chunky (5″ wide to their 3″) but other than that we are still a happy family.

The lesson here, people, is that you don’t always understand situations, and you shouldn’t be quick to judge. In that spirit, Kevin, I’m not going to take it personally that you totally did not bring your Lear jet to save me from the Feds. After a little reflection, I figured out that you’re probably just too proud to say it got repossessed after the whole Madoff Ponzi thing.

It’s cool, man. We’re still bros.

Get ready for more frequent updates from the highways and byways of America least patrolled by the FBI!

Brazilian Ipe – A heartwrenching retrospective on a life well lived.

Yes yes, we all know about Lapacho Ipe and its classiness thanks to 5 Ways Lapacho Ipe is NOT like Tom Daschle. But what about Brazilian Ipe flooring, and its not-so-distant cousin, Ipe decking?

It’s a beautiful story, showing the life cycle of this distinguished wood as it passes through the years of bold browns and brownish-oranges into the autumn of its years, embracing its Centrum Silver shade at the end, but holding on oh-so-valiently nonetheless.

Ipe started out as a little sapling, ready to get out of the rural forest life and into the urban scene, where he could rock cocktail parties, schmooze, hobknot, and live out his days in virile splendor.

Here’s a photo of our little guy’s humble beginnings:

But then he upped and made his way to the big city, making quite the splash, being tres exotique. What classy home-owner could resist some zesty Ipe hardwood flooring the saucy likes of our hero? Here he is in one of the many classy venues he frequented:

Sometimes Brazilian Ipe would party with Kevin Bacon, having met him through their mutual acquaintance, Engineered Gunstock Oak:

But as our Ipe hardwood flooring protagonist became accustomed to city living, he decided to live out his prime becoming a philanthropic fixture intent on making the city a better place. As he reached his ripe old age, he decided to let it all hang out, go untreated, and let his silver show. As Ipe decking, he lived out the rest of his well lived days in gray distinguished glory, supporting city-dwellers on the boardwalk as they made their way to work each day. There he remains, and the beautiful story of Brazilian Ipe comes to a close.

God bless you, Ipe, you fine upstanding hardwood you.

Engineered Flooring: Layers like an Onion, not Duplicity like Madoff

Engineered Flooring Would Treat Kevin Bacon Right, Not Swindle Him. Bad Madoff. Bad. No. NO. Off the Couch.

A wise, mass-marketed green ogre once said that complex people have “Layers, like an onion.” Bernie Madoff only had 2: The legitimate and massively successful business man facade, and then the fraudulent amoeba of greed underneath.

Engineered flooring, well, engineered flooring is different: It’s surface layer? Typically a beautiful veneer of wood that is durable and able to be sanded and refinished,  around 1-2mm thick. But the consistency doesn’t end there: Beneath this surface layer is a solid core of plywood layers arranged perpendicularly to one another to provide maximum structural stability and avoid expansion and contraction that sometimes hinders solid hardwood flooring.

Gunstock Oak: Beautiful, Honest, Stable. It won't ask you for money, just give you your money's worth.

Let me ask you something: Take a look at this Gunstock stained White Oak. Do you think this stuff would ever swindle Kevin Bacon out of his quality-performance-earned dough?

No way.

It would just sit under his feet and support him consistently without swelling and contracting so that he could rest easy and go to work the next morning and turn in awesome performances like that in Wild Things, Stir of Echoes, and Hollow Man (OK wait, scratch that last one, let’s go with Mystic River.)

No, Gunstock Oak would be more like Harry Markopolos, a financial analyst who blew the whistle on Madoff 3 years before the fact, but no one would listen to him, and the Wall Street Journal declined to publish the documents outlining the red flags suggesting Madoff’s wrongdoing. Now, given, a plank of Gunstock Oak teetering into the Wall Street Journal office with a manifesto might be hard to take seriously, but the sheer weight of the evidence held in those docs would probably be enough to overshadow the whole inanimate object courier quandary.

But then, maybe someone in the Wall Street Journal didn’t want the papers to be published, and our hero Gunstock Oak would be used for kindling. New York can be a scary town for a little wood board with a heart of gold.

It took the massive economic turmoil of the recession to puncture through Madoff’s thin veneer and reveal the fraud that had been festering underneath. But you can rest assured, with quality engineered flooring, even the biggest shocks, impacts, and environmental fluctuations will be shrugged off by the earnest strength of natural hardwood and superior engineering.