Floor Scraps, A Treasured Addition

While attending a memorial celebration of Mel’s life and work last week, I revived an old acquaintance with one of Mel’s long time collaborators, a renowned architectural conservator.  Our conversation was a winding one, reminiscing on our mutual respect and admiration for our departed friend.

Eventually we passed into the territories of our own projects, and he mentioned a gift he had for me out in his car.  In a couple minutes he reappeared with an envelope with two index-card sized pieces of wood.

“These are some of the parquet floor remnants from the Oval Office, removed during the renovation of about 1990.”

Wow!

I do not know the configuration or pattern of the parquet flooring, and even if I did the pieces are so small I could not make sense of them.  Perhaps some day I will get a photo of the Oval Office flooring during this period and replicate it, but for the foreseeable future I will be content to enable these remnants to be prominently featured in The Barn alongside the c.1670 oak parquet flooring from the Palaise Royale in Paris.

So, in addition to sections of floor that may have supported  Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, I have a scrap of floor that almost certainly bore the footsteps of Ronaldus Magnus.  How cool is that?

Now I just have to somehow find a piece of flooring from underneath the only truly great President of the past 200 years, Calvin Coolidge…