Musings on Wood 'Bricks'

Hey there,

Years ago, my husband was in the air force and I remember seeing a hangar with a floor made of wood 'bricks'.  They were laid exactly like bricks and seemed to be the same dimension as regular clay bricks.  The memory was jogged today when I saw something about solitary bee bricks being installed on various structures.  I don't think the brick in question was wood, actually.  But while I was musing about how to make such a thing, I remembered the hangar floor.

This lead to my pondering about using such a material on the exterior of any building, especially small, low cost ones.  Imagine you could literally just cobble an exterior together using scraps that lumber yard just throw away.  The rectangular block shapes are so easy to work with.  Great for youngsters and elders and other folks with strength limitations to help with.

How adorable to be able to create also some of those 'bee bricks' and make the outside of your house a welcome spot for solitary bees... which is now leading to the nightmare of having carpenter bees eating my house...  (which is why the original 'bee bricks' are not wood, I suppose.)

Would you all help me gather some photos/vids/resources here in this thread for wood 'bricks'?

Thanks heaps!

I made a concrete floor one time using blocks of wood like flagging stone that was the sand thickness as the floor. It worked pretty good and saved a lot of concrete mixing to make the same sized floor.

The wooden block floor is not unique however, or at least not back in the day. Back in the turn of the last century many mills had floors made of wood blocks, but turned so their end grain was up and not down. Not only did the floor wear better because of this end grain, it soaked up the oil spilled onto the wood. Since many floors were several inches thick it did this for years. But this was back when open journals, grease cups and using talllow as lubrication and lube means was common. It would spray everywhere.

At my work we have two old railroad cars probably built in the 1959s. We use them as oil storage, and while they are on containment pallets in case they leak, yep… underneath them is a wood block floor with exposed end grain.

I saw such a floor in a shop in MN.  The wood was red oak made from pallet scraps.   The down side is I am pretty sure the wood had been soaked in used motor oil.

John F Dean wrote:I am pretty sure the wood had been soaked in used motor oil.

As an intentional preparation for use or just over time because it was a shop?

We had roads in the city of Melbourne, Australia. made from them.

John C Daley wrote:We had roads in the city of Melbourne, Australia. made from them.

Oh that's pretty cool!  I'll have to look up some photos.

That technique is called "Parquet".

My parents owned a house that had a Parquet floor when I was in Jr High, is that called Middle School today?

I really like that kind of floor because it is unique.

Then carpet became popular and that was the last time I ever saw a Parquet floor.

A Parquet floor is about the same as any wood floor when it comes down to upkeep.

We had something called a dust mop that we used every day to keep the floor looking nice.  I am sure a vacuum could do the same thing today.

Area rugs were popular then too so we had an area rug in the living room that was 9' x 12'.  I actually think that rug moved with us from house to house and seems it was red and we had an oriental rug for my parent's bedroom.

I had not thought of Parquet Floors in many years, thanks for the memory.

Hi Christopher,

The color was uniform ….so I am guessing deliberate.

Here is some info.
Melbourne wooden roads

They made roads out of wood here in New England as well.

They were a bit different as they did not use wooden bricks but were planked, but they went for miles and used Eastern Hemlock, a tough wood that is not so easily rotted.

To make planes during the First World War, the US Military had planked roads in the Pacific Northwest to get to the best trees to make wooden aircraft frames.

Near me, (Oakland Maine), they have a hydro dam that uses a half-mile wooden penstock made out of wooden bricks. They are three inches thick in order to be able to withstand the pressure of the water sluicing through it. It has numerous leaks as the last time it was rebuilt entirely was in 1953. It still makes electricity, but once a year they have to dewater it, and then patch holes as best they can.

Wooden Penstock

My initial thought for wood bricks as the structure of a house wall is that they'd expand and contract with changes in humidity.  In the direction of the grain they wouldn't expand much but in the other two directions it would add up.  So, maybe if you orient the grain in the direction the wall runs (parallel to the floor and in line with the wall).  Then the expansion/contraction would make the thickness of the wall slightly change and the height of the wall change but the length of each wall would stay nearly the same?

I wonder how those factory floors didn't swell and shrink.  Maybe the oil plus any initial oil application sealed them up?  But how about on the Melbourne streets?

I did see a chunk of flooring that was taken from a facility like this.  It was shaved down a bit and the resulting cross section was amazing.  Dozens of brass rivets, bolts and nuts that had fallen on the floor over the centuries, had been embedded in the wood.

I am really not sure about the construction of the floor in the shop. It was about the size of a one car garage. To be sure, there were wood bricks laid into it.  I really can’t be sure if they were 2x4 or 4x4.   At the time, I assumed it was rough cut 2x4.  I doubt if the owner cared about expansion issues.   To use the local term, the guy was a Jack Pine Savage.   Someone who lived alone deep in the north woods and engaged in subsistence living. He drove an ancient Chevy pickup with a wood bed. My guess is the shop floated on the surface of the ground rather than having a conventional foundation.  I suppose if the floor did buckle, it was ignored. Or water was poured on it, and it was stomped on.

There is a house by me that was built in the strangest way. It used 2x4's, but they were laid flat upon flat. That is, they would lay a 2x4 down, nail it, then lay another one over it, and nail it down. Each time they did, the house would rise by 2 inches with walls a solid 4 inches thick.

THIS WAS A 2-1/2 STORY VICTORIAN HOME made by a sea captain in the 1880's.

We figured it out and it has around 2 million board feet of lumber in it between exterior and interior walls. It is rock solid and is never going anywhere, but goodness what a colossal waste of lumber.

Steve Zoma wrote:There is a house by me that was built in the strangest way. It used 2x4's, but they were laid flat upon flat. That is, they would lay a 2x4 down, nail it, then lay another one over it, and nail it down. Each time they did, the house would rise by 2 inches with walls a solid 4 inches thick.

THIS WAS A 2-1/2 STORY VICTORIAN HOME made by a sea captain in the 1880's.

We figured it out and it has around 2 million board feet of lumber in it between exterior and interior walls. It is rock solid and is never going anywhere, but goodness what a colossal waste of lumber.

Maybe...  But I hear they have a lot of wood in some parts of the country.  That sounds like a very solid R4-5 which, for the time, was amazing levels of insulation.  Imagine how many tons of coal or fuel oil were not burned to keep it warm for the last 140 years.  

Compared to this building style, it seems a downright frugal use of wood: