A few years ago Butler University renovated their practice gym to upgrade the facilities. The paint was taken off the bricks to reveal the natural colors and other improvements were made. One of the big changes was installing a new floor. I have always wanted to build a desk out of old basketball flooring so I went dumpster diving when they started removing the flooring and with the help of a great friend I was able to get some of the chunks of flooring back to my house for my project.

One of the first things I had to figure out was how to get the planks off of the large sections of underlayment. The floor was cut into square pieces with the subfloor still attached. This tool trial and error to get them off safely. There was a massive amount of nails in the planks that had to come out. It was very time consuming and slow moving for sure and once I got the hang of it I was able to move through them faster.

The next battle was the paint and varnish on the floor. The paint was taken off the wall while the old floor was still in and most of the flooring was covered in white paint. I tried chemicals first and that did not work, so I moved to razors to remove it. Once I found a method that worked to get it peeled back it moved a little bit faster but everything about this project took a long time.

After I got some boards off and cleaned I was excited to finally try to make something with it. I thought it would be nice to frame one of my favorite Butler photos in a frame made out of the flooring. So I experimented with a few techniques until I found a good method for using the boards and building them out. I mounted the boards over a template and then trimmed them down to final size. Once they were mounted I then went to cleaning the boards and trimming them out. They turned out great and really look great on the wall.

Not wanting to waste any of the cut off pieces of wood I made some plug cut outs that would fit into cuff links and pendants. These turned out really cool and I am glad I could use the scraps of wood for something creative.