Floors/Walls/Ceilings
This category is a significant one. Choosing the right materials will be the difference between the inside of the house looking amazing or “ok”.
Floors
Being a very old Queenslander, wooden floors are a must have. The original part of the house has tongue and groove (TG) pine floorboards, 138mm wide, 22mm thick and a dark yellow colour which no doubt has changed over the period of 130ish years. The original boards are of course NOT engineered nor FJ (finger jointed) but are solid, possibly hoop pine.
Getting this exact type of flooring is not easy. We found a few places that stock boards that are nearly the same size:
- 140×21 TG tight knot hoop pine boards at Narangba Timbers for about $10/lm
- 140×21 TG No2 Clear (which has knots one one side and no knots on the other) for $12/lm or B-grade boards (have more knots on both sides for about $8/lm at Wilson Timbers.
Walls
Some people love plaster boards. Some people like VJ panels or sheeting. We don’t. We like old-school tongue and groove pine VJ walls. They look real, they feel real and they are real. They are also real(ly) expensive, especially compared with plaster. But that is no reason for us to not to choose the real thing.
Traditionally, VJ walls were single-skin, just one wall of VJs serving both sides of it, so for example, one single VJ wall between the living room and a bedroom. Today’s standards are obviously different. Sound proofing and structural integrity are things that necessitate having a wall on each side of a wall frame. Clearly this increases the cost significantly but it offsets against the benefits.
For the walls we have gone with the same boards as the floors (140mm x 21mm). They look fantastic we think. We could have bigger (e.g. 152mm) but that’s not really traditional so we didn’t.
