Hardwood Floor Installation! Otherwise known as one of the hardest on your body DIY projects ever!
Hi everyone! This is Part 2 of my Hardwood Floor series. If you haven’t read the previous post about deciding which hardwood is right for you check it out here.
So we picked our hardwood floor! Yeah! Now the fun part! Install. First and foremost depending on which hardwood you pick the wood will expand and contract with the moisture/and or dryness in the air. It’s probably been in a warehouse for awhile and has acclimated to those surroundings. Now that the wood was going to be part of our DIY family it needed to make itself feel welcome in our house. Usually it will acclimate in a few weeks. We had some prep work to do on our subfloor so ours hung out in the living room for about a month before we started installation.
While the hardwood was making itself at home we got the subfloor ready. We tore out the carpet, carpet pad, laminate flooring, and engineered hardwood floor. Yeah for Bagsters! Since we are installing it on the main floor and we have a lower level that means we checked all of the plywood that was under the existing floors for damage and squeaking. We had a lot of places that squeaked so we added a bunch of screws in hopes that it would quiet the floor. It worked on 90% of the squeaks. Some squeaks were just meant to be I guess.
Next up is the underlayment. This is what goes between the subfloor and the hardwood floor. For our traditional hardwood floor it was roofing felt or Rosin paper. Roofing paper? I know that sounds nuts! Why would we use that on a floor? It provides a separation between the plywood and the hardwood and cushions the floor against squeaks. Between that and the extra screws we have a very quiet floor. After we gave the floor a good cleaning I used a staple gun to secure the felt to the subfloor while Ben rolled it out. The rolls have a white line on them which acts as a nice guideline for overlapping the felt.
Next is to find the right spot to start the floor. Since the dining and living rooms would have the same flooring we wanted to start in a place that we could guarantee it would stay straight. We have a huge fireplace that divides the larger room so it was kind of tricky. The last thing that I wanted to happen was for the floor to end up at an angle by the time the floor in the dining room and living room came together.
So we started at the edge of the fireplace. The fireplace is the unifying spot in the room and it’s a huge focal point. We screwed down a row of blocking so that we had something to keep the first hardwood row stable. After the first few rows were secured we removed the blocking. Then we worked our way towards the exterior of the house using a hardwood stapler we borrowed from Ben’s coworker in exchange for a case of beer. I highly recommend checking with neighbors and friends for tool exchanges. It can save a lot of money on equipment that you will not use a ton. We did buy a compressor with nail gun attachments. That was a great investment since we have used it on a few more projects and it’s great to have all of that power.
We stapled about every six inches. One thing to keep in mind is to mix up the wood planks from all different boxes or collections. That way the changes in the plank sizes and coloring all blend together so you don’t end up with dark or light spots in the floor, or areas with a lot of variation and some that are really consistent. You want to vary the length of the planks so that you don’t end up with a stepped seam. It’s like a big puzzle to put together.
This is definitely a two person job. It works well to have one person lay out the row of wood and second person come behind and use a double sided rubber mallet to cinch up the wood against the previous row. Ben and I switched these roles a lot. The mallet and the stapler are exhausting and really use your arm and core muscles. It’s amazing how much your body can take. I had sore arms for weeks.
Once we got to the edge of the wall we left a ½” of a gap so that the wood could expand and contract when the temperature changes. In Minnesota everyone thinks that it’s the winters that are soooo cold. The summers are just as extreme with hot and humid weather so the floor is going to move a lot.
We had good base boards that were already installed so we left them on the wall and installed a cove base to cover the gap. The only thing we had to do was cut down the door frames. I used the best tool ever! It’s a Dremel that has a flat blade. I used a leftover piece of wood to determine how much to cut off and the wood planks fit nice and tight at the door frames! Oh those black marks are from the mallet for the stapler. Those were super hard to get off and paint over!
Because we started in the middle of the room now the rest of the room was backwards for cinching the wood and stapling. The hardwood gods shined down on us and created this nifty little spline dowel that turns the innies to outies and you can go back to installing it the regular way! These are super convenient.
So layout the planks, cinch together, staple. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. It took us a few weeks of working on the floors after work and on the weekends. It’s super intense labor but the results are amazing! I still to this day can’t believe that we did it ourselves. It feels so good to have tackled this and to be able to show it off to everyone.
List of Tools & Supplies:
Compressor with nail gun attachments & nails
Floor stapler & staples
Mallet
Hammer
Miter Saw
Gloves,Knee pads, ear plugs
Safety Glasses
Dust Mask
Nail set (for when you can’t use the stapler close to a wall and have to nail it)
Cincher (for pulling the hardwood planks together when you are close to a wall
Broom
Shop Vac
Rags
Pencil
Tape measure
Clamps (the kind you can reverse to make the ends go out to cinch the edges together)
Utility Knife
Table Saw (to rip long boards that were installed close to the wall)
Dremel (Undercut doors)
Wood Putty (Fill misc nail holes)
Next up: Seal(ing). Kissed by a rose….on the grave. Oooooo.
If you skipped Part 1 about choosing hardwood floors check it out here. Or if this post freaked you out, check out my tips and tricks for planning your own DIY project.
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