Cork Flooring can surprise you!

(If I was wanting a new flooring that’s maybe sturdy,  gorgeous – would last and be easy to live with, well this might be it!. . . . . . . . . call it Spring fever, I dunno  Jan)

ASK THE BUILDER

Surprise! Cork flooring can take a beating

Q.: I’m very interested in cork flooring planks and wonder whether it’s really as good as the salesmen tell me.Because money is very tight, I’m looking for a discount cork floor. A carpet store in my town is having a cork flooring sale soon, so now’s the time to make a decision.

Do you have experience with this material? If so, would you install it again in a home you’d build? Is it as durable as they say? How do you protect it, and is it easy to clean?
A: I can understand your doubts about whether cork flooring is really a suitable material to walk on day in and day out. After all, when you hold a cork from a wine bottle in your hand, you can see it’s somewhat friable. Hold a piece of oak in your hands and try to break it apart or chip it, and your hands quickly wave a white flag.
I used to think the same way about this magical flooring material but was convinced shortly after seeing the first cork floor of my life.

About 35 years ago, my father-inlaw took me to visit a business partner of his named Carl Hunsicker. This man lived in a custom-built home that overlooked the Ohio River at the edge of a bluff. When we walked into Hunsicker’s kitchen, I looked down and saw the strangest floor.

He had cork kitchen flooring. It resembled the deck of a ship as the planks were very long and approximately 8 inches wide. It was dropdead gorgeous. When I asked what kept it from disintegrating as you walked on it, Hunsicker chuckled and said, “Son, you don’t have to ever worry about this floor wearing out.”

I later discovered that cork flooring was used in many commercial and institutional buildings that receive heavy foot traffic. The main library in Cincinnati had a cork floor for years that millions of people walked on. You don’t have to worry about durability if you purchase a highquality cork floor.

To give you another example of its extreme toughness: I installed cork plank flooring tiles on the steps that lead to my basement. Many people don’t realize that steps are the best place to test flooring, as your foot typically slides on the tread surface as you climb the steps. There’s much more friction than walking across a normal floor surface.
My basement steps got extremely heavy traffic because our home office was in several rooms downstairs. We also ran a cottage business shipping a cleaning product from the basement. Countless trips up and down the steps were made carrying boxes of products. To add to this misery, the steps were not vacuumed that often, so there was grit on them.

Just yesterday, I cleaned these steps, getting them ready for an open house. They looked like the day I installed them. I owe much of this to the toughness of the cork but also to the fact that I had originally coated the cork with five coats of high-quality urethane. I knew the steps would be abused, so I wanted plenty of urethane between the bottom of the shoes and the cork.

Another thing that helped the cork on my steps was the custom oak nosing I installed. Because I knew that shoes would be sliding onto each tread, I had the top piece of oak milled so that it was ¹/64 of an inch thicker than the thickness of the cork planks that were glued to the steps. This prevented shoes from wearing away the front edge of the cork on each tread.

I used clear water-based urethane to protect my cork on the steps and the cork that was on the floor in the entire basement. It was easy to apply and has allowed the cork to maintain its beauty for the past 10 years. Cleaning it is easy. I just use regular liquid dish soap and water to clean up spills.   For regular mopping, I add 8 ounces of white vinegar to 2 gallons of warm mop water.
Tim Carter is a columnist for Tribune Media Services. He can be reached via his Web site, www.askthebuilder.com.

TIM CARTER

Have you seen Georgia?

(Well done Josh Noel, you transported me!. . . . .Jan)

Island pleasantly stuck in past

Hiking, biking only ways to see sights in Georgia

By Josh Noel
CHICAGO TRIBUNE

CUMBERLAND ISLAND, Ga. — As I was biking down a washboard road of dirt and sand — the only road that runs the length of this lush, wild island and national seashore — a husband and wife waved me down one afternoon.
They were both about mid-50s, healthy and with bikes of their own, heading up the way I was coming down.
“Did you pass some chimneys?” the woman asked.   Chimneys? No chimneys that I could recall.

There were miles of forest, so thick with live oak and Spanish moss that a green canopy formed above the road. There were wild horses in the forests. There were a few vast summer homes. But no chimneys.   The couple said that the chimneys are all that remain from a complex of slave cabins built by Robert Stafford, a plantation owner who made a fortune on Sea Island cotton in the 1800s. The couple wanted to find the chimneys not only to feed their love of history but also because Stafford was the man’s great-great-greatuncle.

Sounded intriguing. So, off we went down that road so narrow that when two vehicles meet, it’s trouble. A mile on, we met the caretaker of one of the summer homes, who knew exactly where to send us: down an even narrower road. We passed another halfdozen wild horses that paid us little attention but which we gave wide berths anyway, because they can be unpredictable.   Finally, at the end of the road, in a grassy field, we found the chimneys. About 20 of them were lined in neat rows, ghostly nods to history. We wandered silently for a few minutes, admiring the handiwork that has kept them standing so many years later.

“Just imagine: A slave family raised their kids and made food right here,” he said, pointing to where 2 feet of weeds sprouted.   It was touching and disturbing: Exactly where we stood, people treated as property felt safest.  Coastal Georgia is raw like that. The varnished splendor of Hilton Head up north or Florida down south doesn’t exist here.
Yes, there is opulence here, but it is more often a time-worn opulence rooted in the business barons of yesteryear (in the case of Cumberland, the Carnegie family).

For the latest, the greatest, the glitz and the shiny beauty, look elsewhere on the Atlantic coast. Rustic and lovely, coastal Georgia remains unhurried, unbuilt and alive with history.
It is, in fact, 110 miles of two coasts in one. First comes the mainland coast, where the shore sits against a salt marsh and makes a fine place to kayak or watch the endless yellow-green grass turn gold at sunset. Then come the barrier islands that face the Atlantic Ocean. This is where you feel as if you’re at the end of the Earth. Like on Cumberland Island.

A twice-daily ferry that accommodates 300 visitors per day makes Cumberland one of the most accessible of coastal Georgia’s wildest islands.   There is nothing to buy on Cumberland — the best you can do is rent a bike — and there is one place to stay, the 13-room Greyfield Inn, where the cheapest low season room is $395 and men wear sport coats at dinner. The other, more common lodging is camping. It’s routine to see backpackers ambling through the island’s maritime forest of towering oaks and spiky palm bushes in an unhurried, peaceful haze.

“How long have you been walking?” I asked two women coming down the main road one morning with their lives on their backs and bandannas on their heads.   “Hard to say,” one said. “Maybe since 10?”   “No, on the island I mean.”
“Hmm. Couple of days maybe?”

Cumberland offers 50 miles of trail within its 57 square miles and, equally thrilling, pristine, undisturbed beaches along its shores. The first time you step directly from a dense Southern forest to a stark, lovely beach, you know you want to return.

And then there are the horses. About 200 live on the island; they pay little attention to the visitors, even when within a few feet. But sometimes visitors get too friendly, especially in the mixture of a camera and a foal.
“We’ve had a number of close calls,” a ranger told me. “People backing up just in time, maybe getting their hat knocked off as the horse kicks.”

Most visitors come for a few hours and never leave the island’s southern end. They see the ruins of Dungeness, a Carnegie mansion that burned down in 1959, and the nearby beach. Then they mosey back to the dock. But there is more to see, such as another Carnegie mansion in the middle of the island called Plum Orchard, which is open to the public on Sundays, and the First African Baptist Church at the island’s north end.

There also are the beaches, the trails and the horses. And, of course, the chimneys. They’re not on any map because locals don’t want tourists treading on private land and stealing the bricks. The caution is apparently for good reason. As that couple and I prepared to leave the chimneys, the woman grabbed a brick so deeply red, it was almost black.    “I know we’re not supposed to do this, but we’re ancestors,” she said. “I’ve got to have a brick.”
“Oh, leave it,” her husband said. “Leave it for the poor black family whose forefathers lived here.”
He tossed the brick back into the fireplace. She didn’t argue. She knew where it belonged.

CHRIS VIOLA ASSOCIATED PRESS
The 1890s-era Plum Orchard mansion was once home to the Carnegie family.

JOSH NOEL CHICAGO TRIBUNE
The island has 50 miles of trails and roads to explore.

History, nature converge on coast of Georgia

By Josh Noel
CHICAGO TRIBUNE

DARIEN, Ga. — Coastal Georgia is wild, verdant and very not-Florida.

It is so not-Florida that 42-year-old Shane Ward, a naval mechanic from Jacksonville, prefers it to his own state for a little relaxation.    “Everything is still natural here,” Ward said on a ferry to Georgia’s Cumberland Island. “Florida is just too built up.”    The 110-mile coast is a rugged mix of living history and terrain so thickly green that it gets into your nostrils.

It is home to wild horses, decaying mansions, landscapes shifting with the tides, sun-beaten fishermen, quiet islands, pristine beaches and twisting trees heavy with moss. Little of it has been spoiled by highrise condos, water slides and swimming pools.    “You can be in some places so remote you won’t see anyone all day,” said Robby Bufkin, 41, manager of a kayak outfitter on St. Simons Island. “All you need is a boat.”    I didn’t have a boat, but I did have a car and a few days to take in as much as I could, starting at the coast’s northern edge and driving south down two-lane U.S. 17 over a landscape of wooded back roads, stands promising okra and live crab, and a gas station marquee urging me to “Be Blessed.”

The trip started on Tybee Island (about 15 miles east of Savannah), which has little in common with the rest of Georgia’s coast.    Rather than raw and wild, Tybee feels like an Alabama Gulf Coast town: wide, wellpopulated beaches, beerdrinking fishermen and gift shops packed with schlock.

“This is the best-kept secret around,” said Steve Samples, 49, a regular from Calhoun, Ga., dangling a fishing pole in the Atlantic. “It’s about hanging out and getting on Tybee time.”   Lest you think the place is all about relaxation, last year Health magazine rated Tybee the nation’s healthiest beach town. Must be the hiking, biking, kayaking, camping and a 6 a.m. beach boot camp.

The next day, I drove about 60 miles south to the town of South Newport, then headed east toward Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge, a 2,800-acre former military airfield that gators, snakes and thousands of birds now call home. After a couple of hours crisscrossing the trails, I can report that you haven’t lived until you’ve been startled by a gator and a snake within 15 minutes. While on foot. Alone.

A few miles down, I stopped for dinner at the Old School Diner, a restaurant that turns off many people at first glance but then wins them over. The wonder of this place begins in the parking lot, where dozens of rugs have been laid over the dirt to prevent mud puddles. Inside I shook hands with Chef Jerome, a hulking man with a drooping chef’s hat, a salt-andpepper beard and a gold necklace.   “We have a new family member,” he hollered to his staff.

In the red-carpeted, windowless dining room of mismatched furniture, there is no illusion about treading carefully with the fried seafood menu. One of the most popular dishes is the Wheel Chair Platter (as in, “You’ll be so full, you’ll leave in a . . . ”).

A few miles south was another piece of Southern eccentricity: the (supposedly) Smallest Church in America, on U.S. 17.   It is a nondenominational 10-by-15-foot affair. It hosts just one service per month but is always open.

The whirlwind day wound up in Darien, a shrimping town of 1,800 where boats trawl for America’s dinners. There is no shortage of outfitters ready to take you up the lovely Altamaha River, hugged by live oak and Spanish moss, or out toward the barrier islands of the Atlantic.

At my B&B, I met Florence Wildner, 73, who stays in Darien every fall while driving from her summer home on Long Island to her winter home in Sarasota, Fla. We both stayed at the Blue Heron Inn, a charming villastyle home that backs up to a salt marsh thick with tall, yellow grass.    “I love how wild it is here,” Wildner said. “At sunset, that grass turns golden. I mean golden.”

The next day I drove to St. Simons Island, home to golf courses and wealth but also fast food and Starbucks, which makes it one of the more conventional spots in coastal Georgia.    The highlight of my stay on St. Simons was getting away from the modernity and into a kayak. With a guide, I paddled for an hour through a calm salt marsh, across a wavy inlet and then to the tip of Sea Island.

The next day brought Jekyll Island, a few miles south of St. Simons but a world away, a former private getaway for the moneyed East Coast elite — the Macys, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers and the like. The state bought the island in 1947, but its legacy lives in splendid, turretheavy mansions, perfect lawns, brick sidewalks and the $5 fee for driving onto the island.

Jekyll is decidedly more accessible these days. Most notably, the sprawling Jekyll Island Club, once a playground for the wealthy, is now a reasonably affordable hotel where you can almost hear the ghosts of linen suited men smoking Cuban cigars in the halls.

The island offers classic tourist trappings such as a water park, golf and mini golf. It also has just a handful of restaurants, even fewer places to stay and little night life. But that’s hardly grounds not to enjoy.

One of my best afternoons on the Georgia coast was spent on Jekyll on two wheels, riding down the island’s western shore, through the swamps of its southern tip, then along the long boardwalk on its eastern edge. As the sun dipped over my shoulder, I saw an image the Georgia coast served up again and again: the clouds turning pinker and pinker over an endless, swaying Atlantic.

JOSH NOEL CHICAGO TRIBUNE
A couple takes in the view at the Jekyll Island beach at sunset.