Ipe wood porch floor

EEEEE-pay!   We opted for tongue and groove flooring for the porch, just in case we would ever decide to enclose the porch with screen or make it into a sunroom.

Its such a beautiful, dark, rich, red color. I just love it!

The red of the ipe is an excellent contrast to the green siding.

And of course, the ipe looks good with Oliver too!

Now, a few serious points:  

• First, the recommendations are to use a diamond saw blade. Take that seriously. If you try to cheap out, you’ll just chew through the ipe, mangling it, and you’ll run through regular saw blades like crazy.

 

• Secondly, the sawdust it creates is fine, like talcum powder. Oliver and I discovered the hard way that it can cause a super itchy allergic reaction on the skin. I walk around barefoot a lot and of course Oliver is always barefoot. I didn't find any info inline about this, and the allergy specialist i saw treated me like i was crazy. But once we made the correlation and took measures to keep the sawdust cleaned up, we both stopped feeling itchy skin.

 

• Third, the precautionary measures i did find while searching for allergies to ipe are to use a respirator. Breathing that powder fine ipe sawdust would be all too easy, but it can easily cause serious and permanent lung damage.

 

• And fourth, the ipe grain is so tight it doesn't absorb much. No stain. Just oil it. With the weather we get here in Pennsylvania, we should oil it in the spring and fall. But we rarely get to that. And when they say wipe on, wipe off the oil within 30 minutes, do that. We learned the hard way. My handyman didn't read the directions, assuming he knew what to do... Marc and i spent all summer trying to undo the horrible sticky residue. I tried a bunch of things before calling the company. They had two suggestions. Denatured alcohol or sanding. Im not fooling around with sanding it, so we bought a stiff bristle scrubbing brush mop head and a couple gallons of denatured alcohol. It still hasn't all worn away, but it’s much better now. We no longer stick to the floor when we walk!