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Laying floors too soon.

wood cut obliquely across the grain: otherwise they have no strength themselves. Ordinary floors are all the better for the ventilation between the boards, which never remain so close as to be airtight. Of course no tongues do anything towards preventing them from shrinking if they have been put down before they were as dry as possible, or before the plaister of the room was dry, or even if they are planed over afterwards. There is not the same objection to dowels or pins, and where the floor is wanted to show no nails, as floors of billiard rooms which have no carpets, the only way is to nail each board obliquely by the advancing edge and dowel the other edge to the preceding board, making them all narrow. I have seen a pitch pine floor so made in which I could not see a crack. The thin oak floors laid on deal are made in that way.

Hurry in building.-The fixing of floors with no cielings under them should be postponed as long as possible, in order that they and the rooms may be perfectly dry, if you mean them to be like that same pitch pine floor, which was in a house not hurried up in a year, as nearly all my friends have done who have built houses, but taking two or three. It is absolutely impossible for any house to go through all the stages requisite for drying one thing before another is begun, in much less than two years. Yet nothing is more common, even in large and costly houses, than to see men plaistering down to the floors, and even the skirting boards, which have been put in before the walls were dry from their own building. Unfortunately nailing down a floor over a cieling is apt to shake it loose, and therefore in upper rooms we must risk the damp which inevitably rises from the cieling plaister. But there is no such necessity in lower ones, which are the most

Parquetry Floors.

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important, and there the nailing down of floors and the skirting over them may even be postponed and I have known it so-until the rooms have been lived in for some time with fires. Kitchens now generally have deal floors instead of the old-fashioned stone, and there it is especially desirable to leave the boards loose till they have been exposed to the fire for a few months. The present cut floor nails cannot possibly be pulled up with the boards if once nailed down, as the old ones could, which were forged separately and much smoother.

Parquetry Floors consist of squares made up of bits of oak glued together in patterns, and sold separately, and then nailed and glued down on a deal floor. In a certain way they look pretty, but their apparent weakness of construction is offensive to mechanical eyes, especially when the joints open, as many of them in every floor invariably do, sometimes very wide.* In nothing is the inferiority of nearly all modern work to old so striking as in the standing of wood panels of all kinds without cracks. You can get it done perhaps by a few of the very best builders; but in former days it was done by common ones, as you may see-or rather might have seen till lately-in oak and elm doors of farm houses and others, and in quantities of church pews of the last century or two, which have been restored away for the vulgar and ill-made rubbish of most modern architects and builders, who, with a little ingenuity and care, might have modified that excellent old oak work into seats of better shape than the old ones undoubtedly possessed.

* If anybody wants to see what it is liable to become let them look at the floors of the new Royal Academy rooms. A greater waste of money was never perpetrated than laying such floors in such a place; which however is no excuse for their cracking as they have.

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Sound-proof Floors.

Sound-proof Floors. It is thought inconsistent with the character of the best rooms in large houses to be able to hear the noise of people overhead. The only way to prevent it is to have the cieling joists distinct from the floor joists over them. They may, and almost must be, fixed to the same great beams over a wide room, but that transmits the sound very much less than when floor and cieling are fixed to the same joists. A still more complete floor, when the room above is likely to be very noisy is to lay something of a loose kind over the cieling on thin boards. Sawdust, straw, and shavings will all answer, but they are all dangerous on account of the risk of fire from a match or a cinder falling through the floor. Gravel is still better, and I always recommend it over belfry cielings when there is not a room between the belfry and the bell-chamber, but it is too heavy for ordinary house cielings. There remains only what is called 'pugging' or plaister upon laths, which is in fact a second cieling; and felt, either the common very thick felt which is made for such purposes and for wrapping round pipes, but is by no means incombustible, or that new slag-felt which I mentioned at p. 192. But I am told by an architect of considerable experience that he thinks pugging does not make much difference, and that if the cieling joists are independent ordinary noises will not be heard through. I have no doubt that it is inferior to all the porous substances which break the waves of sound much more than anything that becomes solid like plaister. Wooden or lath and plaister partitions between rooms should be filled with shavings, if you wish to keep them tolerably sound-proof; and a single door between rooms is quite inefficient for that purpose.

Closets. It is wonderful how much trouble is fre

Want of Closets.

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quently given by the omission to provide proper closets for buildings of all kinds, or any room to put them afterwards. It is impossible to suggest any general rules for them. I can only advise people to consider and inquire of their friends what provision of that kind is likely to be wanted and generally is wanted in similar buildings, and then to see in the plans that it is provided, and not to take for granted that it is or will be. They should always have both light and ventilation if possible. I do not mean W.C.s only, of which I have already spoken, but closets for linen, china, and other things. A borrowed light will do for some purposes if it is opposite to a window and high enough not to let the room be overlooked from the closet. In churches there should always be a large closet provided for the sexton's tools, and for coals if the stoves are above ground; in some places large enough for a wheelbarrow and spades and also for the bier. I have known great inconvenience and dirt caused in churches by the want of it, and yet it is hardly ever thought of in plans; and as superfluity of area is the last kind of redundance which architects think of any value it is often impossible to provide such a place afterwards within the church at all, and so some shabby lean-to shed has to be built outside.

You must not even assume that a coach-house will hold as many carriages as it professes to do, without measuring the plan. I have seen one built by an architect whose chief experience was in house-building, with the assurance that it would hold two sets of carriages, large ones behind and small in front; and behold, when it was too far built to alter it was found to be only 17 feet deep, while every full-sized carriage is 13 feet long, as he could have ascertained in five

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minutes. The least that will do for that purpose is 24 feet deep. Just in this same way I have frequently been assured that churches would hold from a quarter to a half more people than could sit in them. With some people neither space nor time seem matters of calculation or measurement, but of mere guess.

Locks, being good or bad, materially affect the comfort of a house. There is however one apparent cause of locks ceasing to act for the purpose of keeping doors shut which belongs rather to the doors and the hinges. Either the doors are so ill-made that their joints in the frame have given way, and the front drops, so that the spring bolt of the lock comes below the hole in the striking plate,' or else the same thing happens from the failure of the hinges of which I have already spoken. I cannot go into the construction of locks here, and as to locks for the purpose of extreme security I may refer to my article on them in the Encyclopædia Britannica' (afterwards reprinted in a book with the article on clocks).

But extreme security against skilful lockpickers is not much wanted in house door locks, and there is little to be considered except the general goodness of the construction and ability to keep in good condition under the constant banging to which they are liable. I may say that the small bolts worked by a second smaller handle inside the room are now generally abandoned ; and they are of course useless if a key is left in the lock. If the locks are really good ones, so that no key but their own will open them, every lock and its key throughout the house ought to be numbered, or you may spend hours in finding the right one, if they are all taken out, as they sometimes will be; especially as the keys of the best locks look the most alike; for the

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