# One band of boards is dull, and stays that way on purpose > A section of wooden floor on warm sand — one wide band across the middle scratched and dull while the boards either side keep their shine. August 21, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/the-floor-you-stopped-polishing A section of wooden floor, seen from directly above, boards running vertically. Across the middle sits one wide band, its sheen gone, finely scratched in a single direction along the grain. Either side of the band, the boards hold a soft, even shine. The band didn't wear down on its own. Somebody decided it wasn't worth keeping polished. ## Why does one band of a floor stop getting maintained? Because the wear inside it renews faster than any finish would hold up against. Polishing a floor works when the surface is only crossed occasionally, lightly, in whatever direction people happen to walk. A band crossed the same way, by the same weight, several times a day, outpaces that maintenance in weeks — so a household reaches the point where reapplying a finish to that one strip stops being worth the afternoon it costs, and everywhere else keeps getting it. ## What does the direction of the scratches actually tell you? The exact route, more precisely than a description could. Scratches running every which way would mean general foot traffic — people crossing however they happened to be walking. Scratches all running one way mean one repeated path, walked at the same angle each time, which narrows the band down to a single line between two fixed points in the room: a doorway and a bowl, most likely, or a doorway and wherever a bed sits — the same kind of directed wear [a rug shows in the oval worn into it by the door](/stories/the-rug-by-the-door). ## What makes a good drawing of a band like this? A band that's clearly one continuous width, not a scatter of separate scuffs. The edges of the band should read as a fairly straight line on both sides, even if the scratching inside it is uneven in places — a ragged, patchy shape looks like general wear, while a band with a clean edge looks like exactly what it is: a route, walked so often that its boundary has become as precise as if it had been marked out with tape. ## Isn't leaving a floor unpolished just a maintenance failure? No — the boards either side of the band prove the household still knows how to keep a floor, because they've kept doing it there. A room that had simply given up on its floor would look uniform, dull all over. This one doesn't. The shine either side of the band is deliberate upkeep, applied and reapplied on schedule. The dull band is the one exception, made once the household worked out that reapplying it there was wasted effort, not a chore they were too tired to do. ## Does the same idea work for a floor an animal never walks on? Yes, wherever repetition rather than an animal is the actual subject — a hallway worn by a paper round, a kitchen strip in front of a stove, a workshop floor scuffed in front of one bench. What the design needs is a boundary between a band that takes daily punishment and a floor that doesn't, drawn precisely enough that the boundary itself is the whole picture — a boundary that runs on the same logic as [a chair given over and angled a few degrees from the room](/stories/the-chair-you-stopped-using) or [a second water bowl kept upstairs for exactly this reason](/stories/the-second-bowl-upstairs). ## Do I need permission to draw a stretch of ordinary floorboards? No. Plain boards, drawn as a generic run of parallel planks with no branded finish, no proprietary grain pattern and no flooring company's marketing photography behind it, aren't anyone's design — they're the shape a wooden floor takes. ## Does it print well? Yes, and the contrast between the two finishes is what has to carry it. Keep the boards either side of the band a soft, even tone with a faint highlight running along the grain, and drop the band itself a shade darker and flatter, with the scratch marks rendered as short, fine, same-direction strokes rather than random scuffing — randomness reads as damage, uniform direction reads as a route. Warm sand, bone or a pale oak tone all sit close to how the boards would actually look, which is the point here. ## How do I get one made? Describe the floor at [JustOG](/) — how wide the band runs, and which way the scratches lie. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped. Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop). One band of boards, dull and finely scratched, running dead straight across an otherwise polished floor.