Hi everyone! This is Candy from
Candied Fabrics with a new
Yes You CAN tutorial for you! When we bought our house 6 years ago, the stairs and all four bedrooms upstairs were carpeted with yucky, old, brown carpet. We replaced the carpet in my sewing studio almost immediately with really cheap laminate floor, because pins + carpet do NOT match. The laminate did not hold up well to rolling chair and dropped scissors and irons, so we replaced the laminate with bamboo a year and a half ago. It really brightened up
my studio. This summer I wanted to do a really thorough de-junking of the boys playroom and bedroom — at 9 and 13 they've outgrown a lot of toys, and they also occupy more space, but the rooms aren't expanding with them. So I batted my eyes, smiled real pretty and convinced the hubby that now would be the perfect time to get rid of that nasty old carpet!
The rooms are small, (bedroom is around 10'x 11', the playroom 10' x 13'), and so we needed less than 250 square feet of flooring. (One big compromise in the project is that we left the carpet in the closets — making installation easier and saving some cash as well). We had most of the tools necessary, but all of them are easily rentable from any big box home center or tool rental company. One huge time saver was using prefinished flooring — in previous houses we've installed unfinished hardwood and although I love the feel of a floor that's been sanded and finished after installation (any little imperfections get smoothed over during the sanding) the sander takes some skill to handle and the mess of so much sawdust and the smell of the finish…well, it's a true labor of love! So we went with
prefinished bamboo, which I love of and it is also an easily renewable resource.
Tools Needed• Miter saw for cross cutting the flooring to length
• Table saw (or circular saw plus clamps and a straight edge) for making rip cuts the length of the flooring (the last row will need some skinnier boards)
If you don't have either of these saws, you could rent a Flooring Saw, which can make both cross and rip cuts• Floor nailer (it will come with a mallet) + compressor
• Hammer (and/or nail gun)
• Chalk line
• Measuring tape
• Knee Pads!!!!!
• Something to pad the heels of your hand — like a garden kneeling pad
• Prybar
• Staple gun
• Scraper (if glue was used to adhere the padding under your nasty carpet!)
• Pliers to remove staples and any mis-fired nails
• Nail set
• Utility knife with a couple of new blades
• Shop Vac (or regular vacuum for dust and a broom & dustpan to sweep up staples and other removal debris)
Supplies Needed
• Tongue & Groove Flooring (we used 5/8" x 3-3/4" Horizontal Natural Bamboo w/Clear Finish) 10% above the square footage of the room(s) you'll be flooring
• Cleat nails for floor nailer (the folks at the rental company will help you choose the right ones)
• 15-pound asphalt felt paper
• Finish nails
Make sure to read and understand the directions that come with the flooring as well as how to safely operate these power tools!
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Preparation
Buy your wood/bamboo ahead of time and stack it indoors for a few days to allow the material time to adjust to your home's temperature and humidity level. Clear the room of all furniture (if you can — but if you've got a huge piece of furniture you could move it from one side to the other as you're working, that's one of the beauties of working with the prefinished flooring).
Remove the baseboard by using your utility knife to break the seal between it and the wall and your prybar to (duh) pry it off the wall. Watch those nails! If the baseboard is in good shape, you can save and re-use it — make sure to mark where each piece came from.
Rip up the carpet! Woot! Be careful of the tackstrips around the perimeter of the room. Depending on the size of the room, you may want to cut it into strips. Roll that bad boy up and get that grungy carpet burrito the heck out of your house! Pry up and discard those tackstrips (again, careful! they're sharp — oh, I guess I should point out that installing flooring should be done with shoes on!)
Now remove the carpet padding. If you're lucky like us, the padding will have been installed with 10 staples and one squirt of glue. If you're not lucky, you'll have a lot of staples and/or sticky residue to deal with. Either way, they've all gotta go. Pull up the staples with pliers, scrape up the glue with your scraper and vacuum it all away!
This layer is called the subfloor, and is probably plywood. (Hey, if you're really lucky you find awesome wood underneath here all ready to be refinished. I'll assume you checked this before you bought your flooring). If you have any gaps, holes or gouges you may need to investigate a floor leveling compound to make the subfloor even enough for the manufacturer's specifications. You can now see which way the joists are running — mark their location on the wall. You usually install the flooring perpendicular to the floor joists, but not always. You also want the flooring to run parallel to the longer walls in the room. If these 2 criteria don't match, choose the direction that makes the room look bigger and don't worry so much about the joists!
Cover the floor with asphalt felt paper which provides some moisture protection and minimizes squeaks. Staple it down with your staple gun, and trim with your utility knife. (In case you're wondering, those little dark circles on the paper are drops of sweat!)
Measure the room's width at two or more points to establish an accurate centerline, and snap a chalk line parallel to your starting wall. To indicate the edge of the first row of flooring, snap another chalk line about 1/2 inch from the starting wall exactly parallel to the centerline. This 1/2-inch gap between the flooring and the wall will allow for expansion; it will be covered by a base shoe or baseboard molding. (This is easier said than done…walls are not always straight. You want to generate a line that looks straight in the room, which may not actually be parallel to the wall!)
Timing
You can accomplish the prep in a short or long period, depending upon your schedule and how long you can deal with the stuff from that room being spread out throughout the rest of the house. However, when you rent the tools, you want to make tracks! So clear your weekend, grab a friend or 3, load up the cooler with water/diet coke/beer, put the pizza man on speed dial and go, go, GO! Believe it or not, my hubby & I (with some additional help for about 2 hours mid-day, thanks Brad!) started installing the bamboo at 9:30 AM and the nailer was ready to be returned by 7 PM. Now — did I return it? NO, I was too exhausted to get in the car…but I returned it before 9:30 AM the next day, so I only had to rent it for one day!
Get Started
Open up a few boxes of your flooring and make sure to mix up what box you get your flooring from — you want to mix any minor color variations you may get from box to box. Choose the longest boards or widest planks for the first row, lay them down with the groove facing the wall. Near the wall, where the nailheads will be covered by a base shoe or baseboard molding, face-nail (straight down through the top/face of the board) the first row through the plywood subflooring to the floor joists or sleepers. Use a nailset to recess the nails below the surface. If there's a spot where the wall sticks out and gets in the way of you laying your 1st row down, why…whack it with a hammer! Show it who's boss!
Blind-nail this and the next two rows by hand. Drive finish nails at a 45-to-50-degree angle through the tongues, centered on each joist or sleeper, at the ends and every 10 inches along the lengths. Use a nail set to finish driving each nail.
Now you're cooking with gas
After you've installed the first three rows you now have room to bring on the big guns - the wood floor nailer. Slip it onto the board's tongue and, using a heavy rubber mallet, strike the plunger to drive 2-inch nails or staples through the tongue into each joist and into the subfloor midway between joists. Be extremely careful not to scratch or otherwise damage the flooring. During installation, you'll find it's helpful to lay out several rows of boards, staggering them so no end joint is closer than 6 inches to an end joint in the next row. As you install the strips, cut pieces (at least 8 inches long) to fit at the end of each row; allow for a 1/2-inch gap at the wall.
When installing the second row and every row thereafter, move a short piece of flooring along the edge and give it a sharp rap with a mallet or hammer to tighten the new row against the previous row before nailing. Sometimes this is a gentle tap, sometimes it's a whack!
Remember that end joints in two adjacent rows should not be closer than 6 inches; end joints should also not line up over a joint in the subfloor. The trickiest part is getting the last piece of every row cut correctly. I do this by laying a piece of flooring upside down, with the tongue still facing out, so that it almost touches the wall, and mark where the last piece of flooring ends. The piece with the tongue on the side will slide into the groove when it's flipped over right side up. The remainder of the flooring piece makes a great starter for a subsequent row.
Team Work
My hubby and I have installed a total of 13 rooms of hardwood or bamboo flooring. Lots of them have been just the two of us, with him doing the nailing and I marking and cutting the end pieces. There's another very important job that can be taken on by a 3rd person (and it's awesome with 3 people rotating these jobs). Someone needs to be setting up the next courses: paying attention to where the end joints lay, and with highly figured wood, making sure that there's a good mix of pattern. The person with the mallet is just concentrating on what's in front of them, you need someone to keep an eye on the big picture. If the saw is close by, it's pretty easy for the cutter to do this, but in a few projects the miter saw was down a flight of stairs and out the door, so 3 people make everything flow much better.
Home Stretch
When you reach the final row, you most likely will have to cut some flooring down width wise — using a table saw, the other setting of the flooring saw, or circular saw w/straight edge to ìripî the boards. Measure the width that remains between the floor and the wall, reduce this by º-1/2î use a scrap piece of flooring and a pry bar to wedge the last boards tightly into position. Drill holes and face-nail boards where a base shoe or baseboard molding will cover, using the reference marks along the wall to locate the joists. Set the nailheads below the surface using a hammer and nail set. Collapse in exhaustion (this last step is optional).
If your new floor will cause a change of level to a hallway or adjoining room, install a reducer strip for a smooth transition. This strip, milled with a rounded or beveled top, fits onto the tongue of an adjacent board or the ends of perpendicular boards. It can also be butted against the edges or ends of grooves. Face-nail the reducer strip at the edge of the floor, set the nailheads below the surface, and fill with wood putty.
Last, install a base shoe or baseboard molding. And you are done!
Budget
260 sq. ft. bamboo flooring+ asphalt felt paper + tax = $560
1 gallon blue paint (the playroom really needed it!) = $25
Contractor pack of MDF baseboard molding = $40
1 day rental floor nailer = $37
Total = $662
So what do you think? Was this transformation worth around $700 and a couple of weekends of work?
I certainly hope you've found this post to show you that installing flooring really is doable by folks with a "can-do" attitude. Although it may seem impossible — it really isn't, I promise!
Now, my first 2 tutorials here on Lillyella have been doozies! Rest assured that they all won't be this big and complicated. My hubby & I are on an academic schedule, so we tend to tackle big projects in the summer. The summer is drawing to a close (boo-hoo) so this is pretty much it for large home dec projects until next summer (fingers crossed we do our bedroom, the halls and our large curving staircase in hardwood of some sort…but I'll have to use all my feminine wiles to convince the hubby to tackle those stairs). What's up next month? I haven't decided yet…but I bet it will involve fabric in some way!
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