The old school in Cambria, Iowa needed a new floor at the same time Green & Main was looking for salvage flooring. Repurposing the old maple floor was a perfect fit for the main floor — and sustainability goals — of our Pilot Project.

The original maple hardwood flooring in the Green & Main Pilot Project building provided solid footing for many, many years, probably since the 1930’s when the building housed Sherman Hill’s H&H Grocery Store.

“We could actually see how the store was used by how the floor was worn,” remarked Chaden Halfhill, developer of the Green & Main initiative. Most noticeable was a small area of the wood worn down to only 1/8” thick by the shopkeeper himself who stood in one part of the floor serving customers for years.

Preserving as much of the original floor as possible was of paramount importance to the Green & Main team. However, wear and tear and some exposure to the elements had taken its toll on the solid maple flooring. So a process of painstakingly cleaning the tongue and groove maple flooring began. The Green & Main construction crew carefully pulled up individual slats of the maple flooring, evaluated each piece to ensure that it could be salvaged, and cleaned and replaced the slat back into the floor.

Preparing the repurposed maple flooring for installation.

However not all the maple slats were in good enough shape to preserve. So, the Green & Main team set out to find matching maple flooring to fill in the areas of the floor that couldn’t be saved.

Flooring from Cambria, Iowa in Wayne County

Around the same time maple flooring matches needed to be found, Mike Kinter of Des Moines’ Kinter Construction had discovered that a public school in Cambria, Iowa was hoping to replace the gym’s original wood floor. The southern Iowa community in Wayne County was converting the school, which closed in 1991, into a community center. The old gym floor was for sale, and it was hardwood maple. A perfect match!

“I drove down to Cambria and found the flooring in good shape,” said Kinter. “Most hardwood flooring in older school gyms is subjected to many layers of varnish over the years. Given how old the Cambria school gym was, it was amazing to find this flooring with just one or two layers of varnish which takes much less time to remove. So much of it was salvageable, it took me two truckloads to bring it all up to Des Moines.”

Through the grapevine, Mike heard that the Green & Main building was in need of supplemental maple flooring. The width of the maple flooring from Cambria’s old gym was a perfect fit. The needed pieces were identified, cleaned and integrated into the existing flooring. Now a beautiful ‘new’ maple hardwood floor is ready to support the many people who will step foot into the Green & Main building’s education space in the coming decades.

“It turned out that re-using the Cambria gym floor was a good solution for everyone,” concluded Halfhill. “We’re estimating that 70% of the new floor ended up coming from the Cambria maple. And, the purchase price for the old maple gym floor will go to completing construction of the Cambria Community Center.  Any wood flooring that we determined to be too damaged to be used in the Pilot Project will be recycled.”

That’s a win-win-win!

A shot of the Green & Main Pilot Project main floor shortly after the maple flooring from the Cambria school was installed. It’s now ready for finishing and many more years of traffic as the flooring for this building’s education space.

– Ann Wilde is a Des Moines marketing strategist and writer who also has a special interest in preserving and creating sustainable communities. She likes traveling to places that have amazing technological gadgets.