Flooring Part 3!

DISCLAIMER: I am not a contractor, we just are handy people that like to do things ourselves. Always verify your instructions and info with a secondary source.

In case you missed it you should check out flooring part 2 so you can see our demolition :) In that post we ripped up the ugly vinyl tiles and the plywood they were glued to then screwed the underlay to the studs because the nails were just making life too squeaky!

So the new floors. Despite my awesome pinterest find we will not be doing the 1$/sqft flooring, instead it will be the free$/sqft thanks to the kindness of my father-out-law.

Everything we need to do some flooring, a compressor, hardwood, building paper, and beer. Shotgun, not needed. 

Here are the most of the tools we used (minus the mitre saw):

 Prybar to remove old crap, chisels to take up the trim a bit, hammer in multiple places, air powered nail & staple gun and drill

Table saw for ripping and cutting in

But first we cleaned up and took all the old flooring and other random garbage we had to the dump in my lovely little truck!

And of course the boyfriend said we won't have the minimum weight load but my leaf springs said otherwise..

In case you're not sure what you're looking at here these are my rear leaf springs, the straight metal bar at the bottom is typically curved upwards so as to absorb shock in the box through the wheels. It's flat. This is not good. 

But it's all gone now along with some other reno garbage that'd been kicking around the basement forever. So now we vacuum the hallway and lay some flooring paper:

Flooring paper with and without a great dane passing. Make sure if you have any seams that you overlap the paper by about 4 in because this acts as your vapour barrier, also staple every 8~10 in along the edges. I also put staples throughout the centre to keep it secure from slipping/moving around. 

Then my boyfriend got to try his new table saw, YAY! And the flooring begins :) Sadly the jumbo compressor we bought has a leak so we used the little compressor for the nailer/staplers. I guess instructions would be handy eh?

In the hallway we want the boards to be 1/2 in off the walls ideally to allow for expansion and contraction as the house heats and cools. Since the hall is a little narrower there's less movement so you can sometimes get away with a smaller gap. If you don't have a nice gap on each side you'll need to rip the boards so that you have even width boards on each side and a gap. Engineered hardwood doesn't need as big a gap on top of it being a hall so we had less, probably closer to 1/4 in. So for the first row you make a line with your chalk string parallel to whatever you're lining up with. The first row is nailed down through the top at the edges and stapled on the tongue.

From there you don't need to rip any boards, just chop them to length and using the stapler (not a hand powered staple gun, these won't have enough power to drive the staple in far enough so that it doesn't interfere with the tongue and groove) and staple in the nook of the tongue:

This is the closest I could line up the staple to be in the nook of the tongue. Make sure you keep the staples at least a few inches from the ends and put no less than 2 staples per board and this one is again somewhere around 8 in but you don't need to get super anal about it, you don't want them so close the tongue starts to split off. 

Once the boyfriend finished with the door ways it was video game time so I proceeded to lay the straight rows right up till the stapler hit the wall:

From here we first used the drill to pre-drill finishing nail holes in the nook of the tongue but the last two rows were too close to the wall for the drill in the nook and we drilled through the top of the board and nailed finishing nails. Those will be filled/hidden later :) 

And voila! Finished hall flooring:

Next weekend we may pick up some trim, we need enough for the entire house, luckily the bathroom is already the same as what we're buying, yay! I'm also going to see about building new intake covers because the ones we have are rough to say the least, they appear to be original to this 1950s bungalow. We also bought some wood with routered edges on two adjacent sides that will serve as floor transition covers for the bathroom and kitchen because as you can see it looks gross:

Have you ever laid hard wood? What colour do you like?

Obligatory cute bum pic: