Scribing floorboards - tutorial

I scribed the floorboards for the two wood-floored rooms into the plywood base this morning. 

First, decide which way your strips of flooring will run. If you're using plywood, then I advise you to go with the grain :) (I scribed the boards on the upper floor of the kitchen wing against the grain and it's the biggest mess imaginable!)  Because the grain of this plywood is obviously along the long side, as it tends to be, my floor boards are going to run across the length of the house rather than back to front.  This is important because if you choose to have visible beams anywhere, they need to go at right angles to your floorboards for consistency.  (So, for example, my kitchen beams will run back to front.)

I used a long steel ruler and a steel knitting needle to do the actual scribing.  You need a very firm straight edge because your scribing implement (knitting needle, awl, gouge, empty ball point pen, etc) will want to follow the wood's natural grain, and we want to force it to make nice straight lines :)

Starting at the back of the base, and moving forward,  I scribed lines just as hard as I could into the plywood.  Because this is circa 1690, the floor boards don't have to be perfectly even (thank god).  Much later than that and you'll want to make your boards equally spaced. 

Then I imagined where the floor joists might be (remember, the invisible, imaginary joists run from back to front under this floor).  Real floor boards butted into one another across the joists, and it's also where they're nailed down.   To represent this, decide where your joists will be.  Place your ruler firmly along this line (in this case from from to back -- in any case, at right angles to your floor boards).  Scribe a short line across the width of one "board", then skip two boards, and scribe another short line.  These represent the ends of the boards, sitting across the joint.  You'll end up with something like the example above.  (I'm not showing you the section where I DIDN'T skip two boards, and instead went mad and scribed a whole bunch of boards that didn't need to be scribed.  Sigh.  I'll put a damned rug or something over it, but it will haunt me for the rest of my days:)

Then add the nail marks.  I did this with a small sharp nail -- pressing it into every board, because every board gets nailed to the joist. You could probably put four nail marks into the boards that have the scribed line down them (two on each side of the join) and just two marks into the other boards.  You can also wait until after you've stained and add black magic marker dots, or you can go nuts and hammer teeny tiny little nails into every floorboard :)

Next I'll stain and varnish these two sections of floor.