This Old House S47 E17: Porch Colors, a Brick Paver Patio, and Weaving Salvaged Douglas Fir

Season 47, Episode 17 of This Old House finds the Needham project in that awkward middle stage where finished surfaces go down while the house around them is still a job site. New rift-and-quartered white oak is coming out of a Tewksbury mill for the first floor, the second floor is getting patched with salvaged Douglas fir, and Jenn Nawada and Mark McCullough are laying a brick paver patio out back. The theme, if there is one, is base work. Everything visible in this episode sits on something invisible.

Six Finalists for the Porch Ceiling

The porch is tarped and heated because Needham is still cold, which makes it a decent place to paint in March. Mauro Henrique has a comparatively light exterior load this time: the siding and window trim arrived pre-painted, so his paint work is largely confined to the porch ceiling. What he has got is a coat of primer already up, wood filler and caulk going into the gaps, and six color finalists taped to the wall while the homeowners argue it out. Kevin makes a point of declining to pick a winner. Smart.

Nothing here is technically hard. It is, however, a good reminder that pre-painted siding shifts labor from the painter to the manufacturer, which changes the schedule more than it changes the finished look. The porch ceiling still has to be filled, caulked, primed, and topcoated on site.

A Brick Paver Patio Built on Crusher Run and Concrete Sand

Jenn and Mark are working in a yard that used to hold a rickety pergola, a frog pond, and a concrete patio. All of it is gone. The homeowners wanted open grass leading up to a clean patio, and the footprint they settled on runs 22 feet out from the foundation and 20 feet across, with Mark squaring his layout lines off the house itself rather than trusting the old grade.

The base is where the episode earns its keep. They excavated to subgrade, then brought in compacted layers of crusher run, which Mark describes as stone dust mixed with stone. His pitch for it is drainage plus compaction, and both matter. On top goes roughly an inch of concrete sand, which has coarser aggregate than brick sand, screeded between two steel rails that govern the finished height. Once those rails are set, laying pavers becomes almost automatic. That is the goal. The screed is the last chance to correct grade before anything permanent shows up.

Then Mark drops a distinction a lot of people get wrong. A true paver brick is bigger than a modular brick. Modular brick is what a mason uses in a veneer wall, and it works because it is laid with head joints and bed joints. Paver brick is 8 inches by 4 inches and laid tight, with no joint at all, which is why it is sized differently. The two cannot be mixed in the same field, since the module will not line up.

Pattern options were basket weave, herringbone, or running bond. They chose running bond. Mark sets the first course by tapping the brick into the sand, then uses a half brick to stagger the start and establish the bond from that point forward. Jenn calls it a great trick, and it is: a running bond laid off a half-brick start produces very few cuts at the edges, since the pattern terminates on the same module it began.

What the edit skips is volume. Compaction happens in layers, and each layer gets attention before the next one goes in. On camera that is ninety seconds. In a real backyard it is most of a day.

Tewksbury: Green Lumber to Rift-and-Quartered White Oak

Kevin drives 30 miles to a family-owned mill in Tewksbury that has been running for 200 years. Sean Herlihy is a sixth-generation member of the family. They buy green lumber from sawmills inside roughly a 700-mile radius and take in about 5 million board feet a year, which works out to five or six truckloads a day at 4,000 board feet per truck.

The stacking machine puts fluted sticks between boards. The fluting matters: it reduces the contact points to a couple of small spots per sticker so air moves through the stack and staining is minimized. Sean's real point is flatter than that. How the board dries is what it will be. If it takes the memory of being flat in the stack, you are fine. If it does not, no downstream step rescues it.

Air drying runs one to three weeks, then the wood goes into one of nine kilns totaling 500,000 square feet of drying space, fueled by the mill's own drops, edgings, and sawdust converted to low-pressure steam. Drying schedules vary wildly by species and thickness. One-inch poplar takes about a week. Two-inch red oak takes six months. Kiln temperatures start around 90 to 100 degrees and climb as high as 180 depending on species.

Inside the kiln, Kevin assumes the steam is part of the heating system. Sean corrects him: the visible steam is moisture coming out of the wood, not steam being added. Red oak arrives around 50% moisture content and needs to leave at 6% to 8%. They track it by cutting a numbered sample board on loading day and weighing it every day of the cycle, because weight loss correlates directly to moisture loss for that specific board.

The project floor is a rift-and-quartered white oak mix, fed one board at a time through a ripsaw that takes both edges and splits wide boards down the middle to hit a 2.75-inch blank. Final dimensions come later at the molder: 2.5 inches overall including the tongue, a 2.25-inch face, and a 3/4-inch thickness. Six cutter heads handle the top, bottom, and both edges, cutting the tongue, the groove, the surface, and the back-outs.

Back-outs are the two subtle relief grooves on the underside. Sean explains they relieve stress from the offset geometry, since there is more wood above the tongue than below it, and they also buy you several sandings before the floor is spent. That is the mechanical reason a solid oak floor can outlive the people who installed it. End matching comes last: tongues and grooves on the ends, and a vision system that cuts out defects. A crayon mark in front of and behind a knot tells the machine where to chop. The waste goes to the boiler to dry the next batch.

The order ships the same day. It then has to acclimate in the house for 7 to 10 days, ideally in the room where it will be installed, so it can settle at the moisture content it will live at. That is the same building-science idea behind the rain screen Tom explained in the previous episode's millwork factory and rain-screen segment. Wood wants to reach equilibrium with its surroundings; trapped moisture or rapid change causes movement.

Weaving Salvaged Douglas Fir into the Second Floor

The first floor is getting new white oak. Upstairs, the original Douglas fir stays in all the bedrooms. The project added about 200 square feet upstairs, including a new linen closet, so Charlie Silva saved as much original fir as could be pulled. The homeowners do not want thresholds into the linen closet, and they do not want the three-quarter-inch lift that a threshold would create. So Charlie cuts the old boards back and weaves new pieces in, staggering the joints randomly rather than leaving a visible stepping pattern.

The removal trick is worth remembering. Charlie scores a square line with a razor knife, cutting deep enough to break the grain so the board that stays does not tear out. Then he sets a chisel into that score line and drives straight down. The relief cut matters because the chisel's bevel would otherwise push the cut toward the line and lift the grain on the saved piece. He finishes the cut with an oscillating saw. For a full board removal, he makes relief cuts down the center with a Skilsaw, takes out the center, then knocks the edges inward. To fit the new board, he removes the bottom half of the groove side so the new tongue can drop in place. Adhesive, blind nailing, and face nailing as needed secure the patch. Once sanded, he says, it will not look like a patch.

This is fussy work, and television compresses the cutting and fitting into a few minutes. The open plan Kevin walks through is the downstream result of removing the center chimney, which we covered in E13. That removal made the beam and the kitchen layout possible; here it just means new flooring has to run around a very different room geometry.

Tile Layout Gotcha in the Mudroom Half Bath

Mike is installing 12x24 porcelain tile in a herringbone diagonal pattern through the mudroom and half bath. Porcelain is chosen for durability and less grout, useful in a hard-working mudroom. The layout is dry-laid first, with chalk lines centered in each connected space. Kevin expects the center line to run tip to tip. Mike says that would be true for a square 12x12 tile. For 12x24 diagonal herringbone, the center line is point to point, and a lot of professionals miss it. The correct line yields equal cuts on both sides and a visual center once the tile is set. The chalk line fools you. Good layout lesson.

What the Edit Leaves Out

TV compresses compaction, kiln time, acclimation, and fussy cutting. The porch painting is approachable. The paver base, diagonal tile layout, and salvaged-floor weave are pro-level. The sharpest takeaway is sequencing: material prep and layout decisions determine whether the finished surface looks seamless. A floor that acclimates wrong or a tile field centered wrong is expensive to fix after the fact.

DIY Confidence Scale

8/10. Porch ceiling prep and painting is within reach if you are comfortable on ladders, with caulk, filler, primer, and topcoat. Everything else here needs either experience or a qualified pro.

• Approachable: Sanding, filling, caulking, and painting a porch ceiling. Take your time on prep. The finish follows the prep.
• Not approachable: Paver base excavation, compaction, screeding, and pattern layout. Hardscape work fails from the bottom up.
• Not approachable: Diagonal herringbone tile layout through connected rooms. The centering math is counterintuitive and a wrong chalk line wastes tile and time.
• Not approachable: Weaving salvaged tongue-and-groove flooring into existing boards. The cutting sequence and fitting tolerances are finish-carpenter work.
• Licensed trade or qualified professional: Electrical and plumbing rough-ins were already completed and signed off in this episode. Do not treat those as DIY tasks.

Additional Resources

• Watch on PBS
• Official This Old House episode page

This episode follows the millwork factory and rain-screen tour in E16 and the center chimney removal in E13. The Needham project continues next time.