The Tree in the Basement

If you were to place a marble on the floor of the hallway outside the door of any bedroom on the third floor, it would roll towards the center of the hallway and almost all the way up to the other side, then back. It would roll back and forth, assuming it did not fall down into the stairwell, until reaching a resting point in the middle of the hallway.

The floor is not flat. Without having to do the marble test you can see evidence of this looking at the door of the bedroom. The old-timey box lock on the door does not match up to the latch on the wall by a good inch. How it closes smoothly is beyond me but it does. Another way to tell is to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Like in a slightly zany funhouse the floor isn't quite where you expect it to be, and while half-asleep, one tends to weave and reach out for wall or banister on the way. More than one person has laughingly said they felt a bit like a drunk walking down and back.

The floor below is just the same. And if you go all the way to the basement, aka living room, you will see in the middle of the room, what appears to be a large tree trunk, stripped of bark. This sturdy trunk holds up the center of the floor for the entire house. It does its job well, but whoever put it into place, left the floor low by about 2 inches.

The tree is not at all in the same style as the other woodwork in the house which is generally of high quality and detail. It’s simply an old tree, stuck in the middle of the floor, holding up a massive beam.

Actually, I should say a pair of beams. The entire house-wide cross beam is comprised of two huge oak beams, joined by a craftsmanlike scarf joint, pinned with a very large hardwood dowel. The dowel is actually what woodworkers refer to as a draw-pin. It’s pointed on one end, an essential aspect of how a draw-pin works.

To draw two pieces of wood together and hold them there, the old carpenters first chiseled a square hole into the end of one beam, and a matching square tenon on the other. Then they drilled a hole in the first beam, through the side of the hole and another hole on the side of the matching tenon. The tenon fits into the square hole (the mortise). The hole in the tenon piece was offset from the other by a small amount. When the pin is driven in, the pointed tip finds it’s way into the center of the offset hole and draws the pieces together as it is pounded in.

It takes a year per inch of thickness for wood to naturally dry. As wood dries, it shrinks. The original carpenters didn’t have five years to wait for a five-inch thick beam to dry before using it, so they took advantage of the shrinking effect. They knew that the draw pin would pull the ends of the two beams together, and that over time as the wood dried, the pieces would shrink, making the joint ever tighter and stronger. Today it might be impossible to drive the pin out.

But this leaves a question. If the beam sagged, and had to be supported, what went on before the tree trunk was placed in support? Was there a time when the house threatened to fall into itself? Or was there just a gradually bending and bowing of the floors until one day one of my predecessor owners deemed it time to put a stop to the movement?

We may never know, but one thing’s for sure — that tree in the basement is a very important piece of wood.