Laying a Hardwood Floor
Posted by Wayne
We had our appliances scheduled for delivery on about January 19, and my original goal was to have the hardwood floors installed before that date so I could start right away with installing the appliances. We picked out some engineered wood in early December from Home Depot and it needed to be special ordered and they told us it they would have it in about 2 weeks. We also had to order a t-molding for where the hardwood floor of the kitchen would meet the carpet of the living room, and a threshold piece for where the hardwood would meet the sliding glass door.
I prepared the floor by ripping up the old linoleum and removing all of the baseboard trim. The linoleum left a fair amount of paper and glue residue. I spent quite a bit of time scraping up all of the paper, but I was still left with a lot of old glue that didn’t really want to come up. The difference between where there was glue remaining and where it came up with the linoleum left a lot of spots in the floor with up to an 1/8th inch difference in the height of the floor. I had intended to nail down the wood to the floor, but because I couldn’t easily get a super level surface I went with the easier option of gluing it down. I knew the glue would fill in any of these height differences and leave the finished wood at a perfectly level height. This was probably over cautious because the height differences were really minimal, but I didn’t want to take any chances.
The wood took about a month to get in (with no explanation), but the threshold and t-molding still hadn’t arrived so that delayed the start of this project even further. I really needed to see the threshold piece before starting on the floor. I had a good idea of how the threshold piece would work out, but wasn’t sure about all the dimensions of the piece. The threshold piece would be filling in the gap between the first row of wood and the sliding glass door:
I finally got the call on th 18th of January that the extra pieces had arrived. I didn’t push back the delivery date of the appliances because I’d be installing them myself anyways and I only really cared that the delivery guys got them into the house (the hard part). Once I examined the threshold piece I was confident that it would fill the gap between the sliding glass door and the first row of wood. I was ready to start on the floor.
A bit of good news was that the room is square (for once). The ugly linoleum I had torn up had a pattern of squares and from this I could see that all of 4 walls were square to each other without even pulling out the tape measure thanks to this pattern. All the lines in the linoleum were parallel to the walls.
My choice to glue the wood down started me off with an issue. The wall where I’d be starting was really was the only sensible place to start laying the wood, but it also wasn’t a solid continuous straight surface due to the sliding glass door gap. I could easily make the first row parallel to that wall, but I knew if I tried to hit any successive rows into place with a wood block and hammer it would just bow the first row into the gap. There wasn’t any way to keep that first row parallel to the wall unless it was really secured to the floor before I started on the second row.
My solution was to install the first row, let it dry overnight so it was secured to the floor, and then I could really start on the floor with a solid surface on which to push successive rows up against for a nice tight gap. Another option was to rip a 2×4 down and put it in the gap so the flooring would have something temporary and solid to press up against, but I don’t have my own table saw and that would be more work than just putting the first row in and letting it dry.
Installing the wood was really pretty easy. I would trowel enough glue onto the floor for a couple of rows and then cut and install a row of flooring. I’d use a wood block and a hammer to make sure everything was nice and tight. The glue would start to toughen up after about 10 minutes, and every so often I’d carefully walk over what I had already done just to make sure it was sticking down to the floor. You can rent a 100 pound roller to go over the wood, but this isn’t necessary The wood stuck down very nice and level with only a little bit of pressure.
You’ll notice in the pictures below that I re-installed the heat vent cover right after I had installed the wood. I had dinner with a friend a few weeks before and he told me about a time when he was remodeling a part of his house and he left that off for a while. When he later heard meowing from inside the walls he knew that this was mistake. He had to cut holes into the ceilings of several other parts of his house to locate the dumb cat that couldn’t resist exploring the house’s heating system.
Because you don’t want to see any sort of pattern in a wood floor with the lengths of the pieces, I’d basically just cut the starting piece in a row at an random length with a mitre saw and then use the remainder as the starting piece in a later row. The wood can expand and contract, so I left a small gap between the wood and anything permanent (walls, cabinets). After I reinstalled the baseboard trim, this gap would be covered. When I needed to “rip” a piece of the wood lengthwise I ‘d cut it with a circular saw. These were always up against a wall or cabinet so the cut didn’t have to be 100% perfect because it would be covered by the baseboard trim.
When I was in the middle of installing the floor the appliances arrived. I told the guys to just put them in the living room and I kept working.
While installing the floor was an easy job, it was repetitive, took a long time, and it killed my back to stand hunched over all day. There were only a few intricate cuts (going into the pantry) and the whole job took me about 8 hours.
The end result, like everything else, was a huge leap forward in how the kitchen looked. It finally felt like we had a kitchen back instead of a construction zone. My remaining tasks were now to tile a backsplash over the counters, install the appliances, and do the trim on the whole kitchen. I could finally see the finish line!
Total cost: $800, Total time: 8 hours (10 hours if you count tearing up linoleum and scraping floors)
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