Who is Frame Industries?

Since that time, Chelsea Plank Flooring has come to be known as the premier, domestically manufactured, prefinished solid hardwood plank flooring in the United States. Manufactured in a modern, state-of-the-art facility by well trained and conscientious craftspeople, Chelsea Plank Flooring quality exceeds all industry standards as we strive to provide the best solid hardwood flooring available.

To accomplish that goal, the lumber used in the manufacture of Chelsea Plank Flooring is purchased from a select group of reputable lumber suppliers. These long term lumber partners ensure we receive properly dried lumber that has been processed from responsibly and ethically harvested, northern growth timber. The bright color, tight grain and vibrant heartwood/sapwood contrast of domestic, northern growth timber is one of the biggest factors that sets Chelsea Plank Flooring apart from our competition.

Once in our climate controlled facility, we rip the kiln dried lumber to width and mill the flooring to exacting specifications. Unlike manufacturers with more lenient dimensional specifications, the tongue and groove fit of Chelsea Plank Flooring is tight to provide a solid installation that, if properly cared for, will last for many generations.

The Chelsea Plank Flooring finish is a multi-layer, UV cured urethane. Formulated for optimal hardness and durability, the finish on Chelsea Plank Flooring is formaldehyde free and offers zero VOC outgassing.

With our exacting manufacturing processes and standards, and over 60 unique color and style options, Chelsea Plank Flooring offers the best solid hardwood flooring product value on the market today. In addition, Chelsea Plank Flooring is proudly made in the USA.

Putting the “Plank” in Chelsea Plank Flooring.

Every plank of real, solid hardwood plank flooring offers a different appearance. This ensures every Chelsea Plank Flooring floor will be both beautiful and unique.

What is Pattern Plank?

Pattern Plank is the term we use for a mixed width, repeating pattern installation. The most common Chelsea Plank Flooring width combinations are 3/4/5”, 3/4/6” and 4/5/6”. Though Chelsea Plank Flooring is sold and installed in single width, the majority of our sales are Pattern Plank.

Why Pattern Plank?

Aside from ensuring an even more unique hardwood plank floor, there are a couple of  “practical” reasons we encourage the sale and installation of Pattern Plank.

1.      We attain greater lumber utilization (yield) when we manufacture roughly equal quantities of three or more plank widths. By encouraging the sale and installation of Pattern Plank, our inventory remains more evenly balanced, allowing us to avoid low utilization (yield), single width production runs. Hence, by manufacturing and selling the Pattern Plank installation format, Frame Hardwoods is a better steward to the forest and Chelsea Plank Flooring is inherently a more “green” hardwood plank flooring than the vast majority of our competition.

2.      By utilizing the Pattern Plank installation format, you prevent the dreaded Bowling Alley Effect. In short, the human brain is always looking for symmetry and once identified, it becomes a defining characteristic of the object you are viewing. With hardwood flooring, it doesn’t matter if the planks are 3”, 4” or 12” for that matter, once you notice the pattern of the joints between the planks…….the floor starts to look like a bowling alley. Pattern Plank breaks that symmetry, allowing the eye to concentrate on the beauty of the planks as opposed to the joints between them.

Is Pattern Plank a modern design?

Pattern Plank is actually a modern adaptation to how wooden floors were installed hundreds of years ago.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, or more specifically the advent and proliferation of water and steam driven sawmills, lumber was sawn by hand. Though the sawyers of the day were intrepid and hardy souls, they didn’t waste time or effort sawing big planks into little planks if they didn’t have to. As such, early wooden flooring was often sawn slabs, squared at maximum width. Since each slab falling from the round log was a different width, flooring installation widths were often totally random.         

So, is Pattern Plank modern? Yes, kind of, and it sure looks good in modern houses, rustic cabins and everything in between!

Frame Industries History

They both graduated from Chelsea High School and attended Ferris State University. Growing up on a small farm, David was the president of Chelsea’s chapter of the Future Farmers of America. After graduating from Ferris with his bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics, David worked as a computer programmer for Malloy Lithographing in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

As the story goes, in the spring of 1989 David and Lisa had their first child, Megan, who was a particularly colicky baby. Lisa says Megan would cry every single evening at 7:30, so David found a reason to be out of the house. Later that year David began a part-time venture on evenings and weekends with his close friend Don Sullivan. Interested in logging, David had some experience on his family farm while in high school and was unafraid of learning more about the lumber industry. With $600 in cash, David and his partner started a logging business called Frame & Sullivan Hardwoods. The first set of equipment was a 25” Stihl chainsaw, 4 log chains, and 4 chain binders; plus between the 2 of them they already owned 2 pickup trucks, 2 tandem axle trailers, and 2 tractors. They bought standing timber from local landowners, cut the timber, and took it to two local sawmills which they helped run to saw their own lumber. After a few trips into the ditch with a load of logs in the middle of an ice storm, it soon became apparent David needed to upgrade to a four wheel-drive pickup!  Lisa managed the books from home and took the phone calls while also working a full-time job.

David learned about the lumber and millwork business from mentors in the sawmills, kiln-drying operations, custom millwork shops, construction industry, and existing hardwood flooring manufacturers. After the logs were sawn into green lumber it was then stacked on drying sticks at home for air drying, then the lumber was taken to be kiln dried at one of two local kiln driers. They would either sell the kiln-dried lumber to local contractors or use it to make custom moldings in the barn behind his home. Sometimes the custom pieces were so long that they had to put a hole through the end of the small barn to run it through the molder!  Around this time David also started a local flooring distribution business buying truckloads of unfinished strip flooring from Memphis Hardwood Flooring Co. (Chickasaw brand), and Tembec Forest Products in Canada, and selling to local contractors out of 2 other pole barns.  One summer, Megan dressed up as “Miss Chickasaw” at the community fair to pass out business cards.

In 1994, David made the jump and quit his job at Malloy to work full time at home in his quickly growing business. David and Lisa bought out their partner and incorporated Frame Hardwoods on their own. At this point David was receiving noise complaints from his countryside neighbors, so in January 1994 they rented 5000 SF of a building in an industrial park in Ann Arbor. In the next 2 years they expanded to 15000 SF in the same park, including a (slightly drafty) office. Lisa was now working full time for their business and brought on her former co-worker Julie Schneider to help in the office. In these days, you could often find David and Lisa’s two children Megan and Max “helping” by licking stamps for mailers. By 1996, with the custom home building industry in Ann Arbor going strong, David was running a full scale custom molding business, and also started milling custom plank flooring orders, in addition to the truckloads of unfinished strip flooring coming from the large strip flooring mills.

In 1996 David recognized the need in the building industry for high quality, precision crafted, quality-controlled plank flooring. He knew he could make a higher quality plank flooring than the large strip flooring mills he was buying from.  So he purchased several acres on West Industrial Drive in Chelsea and by June of 1997 he was manufacturing plank flooring in his new 21,000 square foot facility. Chelsea Plank Flooring was born! They began pre-finishing right away through a contract finishing facility in Indiana. Investing in a 24” gang ripsaw and high-speed molder was the beginning of mass production for Chelsea Plank Flooring, allowing them to run 12,000 board feet per day. They would often run 50-60 hours per week to keep up with demand. Within one year they added another 20,000 square feet onto their original building. Working past sun-down most days, David has been known to take a nap on a pack of lumber for a quick pick-me-up!

To increase their yields and manufacturing capacity, David built another 30,000 SF manufacturing building to accommodate the purchase of an optimizing ripsaw in 2003. Now they could process 20,000 board feet of lumber per day! In October 2003 they installed their own finish line in this second building to maximize the quality control of the finished product. Now Chelsea Plank Flooring was 100% made, start to finish, in Chelsea, Michigan. With a much larger footprint now, David started riding a bike between buildings!

By 2010 they added another 21,000 SF building for lumber storage. David has always been heavily involved in machinery maintenance and improvements, so a small machinery fabricating shop was also added. In 1999 he designed and built the machinery for distressing plank flooring; this process was patented in 2003. In 2015-2016, with their new fabricating shop, David and his maintenance team built a set of computer-assisted machinery to do the automated material handling for the flooring operation. Improving reliability and efficiency, this was a major upgrade that also incorporated an optimizing chop saw. David’s son Max is a mechanical engineer and has helped out on several upgrade designs.  Since the addition of a new optimizing ripsaw and an optimizing chop saw in 2016, Frame Hardwoods can now process 22,000 board feet per day in one 10 hour shift.

Megan has always had a strong interest in both mathematics and the family business. Even while teaching mathematics at two local colleges by the age of 23, Megan never stopped working part-time in the office at Frame Hardwoods. Since 2014 Megan has been working full-time at Frame Hardwoods, stepping up to manage the business as David and Lisa begin what David calls “semi-retired” life.

In David’s new-found free time, he began educating himself on solar power to solve a problem presented to him at a property in rural Northern Michigan. In hopes of offering this pre-engineered and pre-wired alternative power system to consumers, Megan and David created Great Lakes Applied Power (greatlakesappliedpower.com) and re-named the company Frame Industries, Inc. in 2022 to encompass both flooring and power product divisions.

Lisa always says that David’s motto is “Don’t stop until it’s done”, even if it means coming home so late that your dinner gets fed to the barn cats once or twice. Through the hard work of David and Lisa, their children, and their dedicated employees, Frame Industries has come to be known by flooring distributors and dealers as producing the highest quality pre-finished plank flooring available. To this day, Frame Industries still purchases lumber from the some of the same sawmills in Michigan and Indiana that supplied them when David was running custom moldings in the early 1990’s. Frame Industries may have grown by leaps and bounds, but it is still a small, family-run business with strong ties to its roots. The Frame family is proud to carry on Chelsea Plank Flooring into its second generation.