What they do/JJ O'Sullivan, floor decker: Have problems with gusts coming through gaps in floorboards? Bernice Harrison meets a man who'll deck your floor properly in no time.
At this time of the year my hall floor becomes a giant air vent with cold gusts whistling up through the gaps between the floorboards. One solution would be to lay wall-to-wall carpeting but unless you go for a highly pattered version, it's not really an option in a space that gets a good deal of wear and tear.
The problem is that one of the previous owners seems to have had a bodger plumber who ripped up the floor to install the central heating and never put it back properly.
Gaps in old floorboards are a common problem and there are some DIY solutions. One is to make up a paste of newspaper and wallpaper paste and to shove it between the cracks (bit too messy for me).
The other is to buy slips of wood the same width as the cracks, glue the sides of the wood and wedge them in - I tried this and it mostly worked well although a couple of the slips fell through after a while (hence the continuing gales) and disappeared.
Another option would be to have the whole floor ship decked.
JJ O'Sullivan specialises in ship decking draughty floors. The technique, he says, comes as the name suggests from boat-building. "When the job is done," says JJ O'Sullivan, "the whole floor is sealed."
Using a special machine he opens the floorboards out creating a nine millimetre wide gap which he then fills with a strip of mahogany. Although nearly all the floors he works on are pine, he says pine strips are unsuitable.
"Pine is a very knotty wood," he says, "and in strips of pine this narrow, the knots would make it break."
The resulting effect is a type of pin stripe - wide pine planks with narrow dark strips between them. The reason why his strips of wood don't fall down between the planks and mine did, is that his machine creates a clean surface on the side of the floor boards so that the glue that holds the mahogany strips has a clean surface to cling onto. The reason why my strips of wood fell down, according to JJ, was that the glue wouldn't stick to my dusty floorboards.
Don't people mind that their newly ship-decked floors are, well, stripey? "No, because you do the whole floor, not just a section of it, so the whole look is uniform," he says. "It's a technique that originated in Europe, then went to America and I trained with a guy who brought it back here."
JJ O'Sullivan has been in the flooring business for 10 years and has two flooring crews on the road full-time.
After the strips have been put in, the floor is sanded and varnished or polished - he often gets requests from people who just want the gaps filled but he prefers to provide a complete service so that when he closes the door on the job it's completely finished. To have a floor ship decked costs around €1,000 for an average sized room.
JJ O'Sullivan - 01-8307347
