Sportin' some new wood

The Bearded Wonder is great with wood..... flooring, wood flooring. I know what you were thinking. I think it too, because I have the sense of humor of a 12 year old boy sometimes. I post this picture so that you too may marvel at his wood.... floor.

You may not know this, but our upstairs hallway was a nightmare. The carpet was completely ruined, which may have been a key reason that we were able to score our home on the cheap. The offending carpet was wavy, stained, and marked for death by the previous owners' pets; and it was beige. Everything in this house is beige. They had a love affair with the DMV, the Social Security office, and the IRS waiting room. We have no less that 6 different colors of beige in this house (2 on the same walls in most cases, more on that later).

Here are a few photos of the carpet before hand....

Mystery Stain

Carpet is not the ocean, there should not be waves.

As you can see, right when you come up the stairs, bam.... huge black pet stain. I attempted to have a carpet cleaner come out and remove the stains, but that one kept coming back. 

Being as I am obsessed with cleanliness, the BW and I decided to remove the horrible carpet and install hardwood floors before the baby came, as in 2 weeks from my due date.

We decided to go with Bruce pre finished hardwood floors in butterscotch oak from Lowes to match the flooring downstairs. It is not an exact match, but it is close. I would have preferred dark wood, but I thought that would look strange with the downstairs hardwood being light. One day, I will refinish all the wood and make it dark, one day.....

There are a few tips and tricks that we learned along the way. I will share those as I go along.

The tools:

                            Gloves

                            Eye Glasses

Carpet                 Carpet Blade

Removal             Pliers

                           Staple removal bar (resembles a crow bar)

                           Contractor Garbage Bags

                            Staple Gun with Staples

Laying                Underlayment of choice

Underlayment     Hammer

                            Punch

                            Clear Packing Tape

                            Dremel Multi-tool

                            Hardwood flooring

                            Shoe Moulding or 1/4 round

                            Compressor and hose

Installing             Air Gun with brad nails

Flooring              Harwood Nailer with nails

                            Rubber Mallet

                            Table or Mitre Saw

                            Spackle

                            Wood Filler or putty

                

Carpet Removal:

Step 1: Remove the carpet and pad very carefully. If you are keeping carpet in the bedrooms and are going to have to transition from wood to carpet, keep this in mind and keep the carpet and pad in the doorways long so you have more to work with when installing the transition. If you cut it too short, you may end up with a wonky transition that doesn't look very good.

Step 2: Remove the staples and tack strips. Be careful when removing the tack strips along tile. When using the staple and strip remover, you may accidentally go through the strip and into the tile which will either chip or completely break your tile. 

Step 3: Wrap up all the carpet, pad, and tack strips into a contractors trash bag and take to the recycle center or dump. Most trash companies will not pick this stuff up unless contracted before hand. This is also a good time to keep any scrap carpet for repairs or replacement down the road in any of your other rooms. Carpet behind doors and in non trafficked areas is the best for this.

Underlayment Installation:

Step 1: Measure all of the areas you will be installing hardwood in. Find your longest run and measure the width of that run. Try to make a few cuts as possible when laying underlayment. As we were laying flooring in the hallway, we went the long way across the floor. The manufacturer recommends that you go in the direction of the joists, so that the underlayment is perpendicular to the run of the wood. In our case that would have resulted in many stumpy pieces of underlayment, so we opted to go in the direction that the floor would be laid down for simplicity sake.

Step 2: Using your staple gun, staple down all of your underlayment. Adhere pieces together using provided strips or the clear packing tape to prevent shifting and pinching between boards.

Step 3: Cut Baseboards and doorways for hardwood to slide under with your Dremel. Make sure that you clean up all the sawdust from this process, or it will be stuck under your hardwood forever and may cause the floor to pop/squeak in the future.

Installing Hardwood Floor:

Step 1: Running perpendicular to your joists, measure your first row. It is recommended in a room to start from an exterior wall, as they tend to be straighter. You can also start in the middle of the room with one row and use the direction change splines that they sell at lumber liquidators to allow you to use the hardwood nailer in both directions. Standing on the board to prevent shifting, using rubber mallet, schwack the hardwood nailer to shoot a nail into the tongue of the first board.

Underlayment and the first few rows. We started in the center of the hallway

Step 2: Continue installing boards until your first row is complete, remembering to leave an 1/8" expansion gap. It is all downhill from here. Install your second row of boards in a random pattern while ensuring that no 2 boards end at the same point. The boards should be staggered.

Continuity in wood direction sometimes means short boards in some areas

Step 3: Using the hardwood nailer, install as many boards as you can until damage to your walls is imminent. When this occurs, use your nail gun with brad nails to secure the wood through the tongue of the board. When you get to the row closest to a wall, top nail that last row.

Step 3: When you come to a doorway, decide how you would like to transition into the next room. If this is carpet, you will need an additional step. We decided to use a hardwood board across the threshold to the bedroom to make the transition clean and without that (in my opinion) ugly u-shaped transition piece. To do this the BW used his router to remove 1/2 an inch of wood from the underside of the transition board to allow the carpet to tuck up under the board to create a smooth transition.

Perpendicular transition

The tile transition required us to purchase sanded caulk in the color of the grout and create the grout line transition from the hard wood to the tile. If your tile is not set up high enough, and you are using 3/4 inch hardwood, this may pose a problem for you. You may be stuck with a transition piece that accounts for the elevation difference from the tile to the wood flooring.

Tile to Wood Transition

This is the short carpet, can you tell?

We hit a snag with the step going into our bonus room. We needed a bullnose or rounded piece of board that was 48 inches long. This piece was not carried at the local Lowe's. We ordered the threshold step from lumber liquidators and cut it to the correct size for our application. However, this piece took 2 weeks to ship to our home, so this is what we were left with for that time period. Our advice, plan ahead and get ALL the pieces that you will need to complete the job.

Step 4: Once all the hardwood is installed, cut the shoe moulding or 1/4 round to hide the expansion gap along the walls. 

Step 5: Use a punch to push the brad nails further into the shoe moulding and fill with wood putty or wood filler.

Step 6: Use wood putty to fill and gaps in the pre-finished hardwood flooring that will occur, as no board is perfect and no house is square. Paint the shoe moulding to match the baseboards. I taped the floor, so as not to paint the floor as well as the shoe moulding.

That is how it went down in the Burke household. This is the second hardwood installation that we have done, and it is always a challenge. This floor was a challenge due to some tricky angles and cuts that had to be made to accommodate the Juliet landing at the top of the stairs. We get faster and better each and every time we lay the flooring. Maybe by the time we get to the master bedroom, we will be good enough to do a picture box design.

Jenna

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