First Time Laying Hardwood Flooring

since finding a house I've been dying to rip up this carpet in the master bedroom and lay down some solid hardwood flooring so that's exactly what I'm gonna be doing this week stay tuned if you want to see how it turns out now this video is sponsored by Lumber Liquidators so I drove over to one of my local store and sorted through their very impressive variety of species and designs colors and styles of flooring if you have a flooring project on your to do list and be sure to check out Lumber Liquidators there is a link for you down below there are great resource to get high-end brand names but for lower cost I personally decided to go with a 3/4 inch solid pine floor that is also pre finished the first thing you have to do whenever getting your flooring home is to take it out of the box and let it Akal me I let mine sit in the living room which is the adjoining room to the bedroom for full seven days before getting started on my project the master bedroom is a round form from in 30 square feet so I brought home a total of four hundred and seventy square feet of flooring material which is what I thought I needed plus 10% to start prepping the room I first went through and removed the baseboards I used a flat bar and made sure to take my time to not tear them up next I started removing the carpet which is just held in place by those nasty little tack strips you can easily just pull it up and then also cut the carpet into strips to make rolling it up a little bit easier or you can do like me and get impatient and try to roll up half of the room in one roll but it is surprising just how heavy carpet is next up was removing the foam which in my case was very easy because instead of being held down by staples it was actually held down by adhesive on the outer edge so in my case this step took no time but if yours is held in place by staples and you will have to go through and remove every single one after that I moved on to removing the tack strips using a flat bar and a hammer and of course be careful because these little things are nasty I used a floor scraper to scrape off the little bits of a remaining foam that was on that adhesive after giving the entire floor three thorough sweeps in a vacuum a certain Lane my on Leeman I started on one side of the room rolled it out and used a staple gun to attach it to my subfloor with all of the floor prepping done I now started laying my flooring now in the room there is a small section of tile that I did not want to remove so I started my flooring off by ripping down a board that will act as a transitional strip between this tile and hardwood floor and you'll see that on this particular strip I chose to cut off the tongue and only leave the groove and I'll explain why I did that later on to attach the board I'm using a 16 gauge pneumatic nailer and I'm faced nailing it with that one in place I can now start laying my rows for the very first row I chose to use the longest boards I could find in order to give this row a lot of strength now you don't want to start the road directly up against the wall you want to leave yourself what's called an expansion gap my baseboards are half an inch thick so therefore I left it three-eighths of an inch expansion gap which will allow the flooring to expand and contract but then the baseboards will cover up the gap whenever the room is finished since I personally have that tile to contend with I figured out what I needed to rip down the first row to so that whenever I get to the edge of that tile the very next row will be able to be a continuous row from the far left wall to the far right wall to set my first board in place I measure 3/8 of an inch off of the wall and then once again used my 16 gauge nailer to face Neil it note that on my starter row I have cut off the groove and have placed the tongue facing towards in a room when getting down to the very last board I would take a measurement on what the board needed be cut too and use my Triton project saw to cut the board too late starting on my second row was when I was able to start using full width board which my boards are 5 and 1/8 of an inch wide it was on my second row that I had enough room to start using a flooring nailer instead of purchasing a kneeler I rented mine at my local big-box store since my flooring is 3/4 of an inch thick I'm using 2 inch long cleats which is the name of the fastener so with all of these tons facing out and then having the on the right I made this transitional piece have the groom facing out but then this transitional piece has me tongue sticking out so that whenever I put in this row it has a tongue all the way down facing out for the next row to connect to so if you have an outside corner or any situation just make sure you're thinking ahead on how all the tongue and group pieces will interlock if you're using tongue and groove board then you're gonna want to make sure that they're connecting to one another as best as possible so that you don't have any gaps the majority of the time I would simply tap the board in place using the mallet for the nailer now you want to be careful because of course you don't want to damage the tongue so the times that I would need to persuade the board a little bit more I would use a rubber flooring accessory that has a lip on it that I could hook on to the edge of the board and then hit it into place a little bit harder something else to think about when you're Blayne down your boards is you want to stagger your seams this not only gives the rose some strength but it also gives the entire floor a very nice random looking look what I personally would do was pick an assortment of boards from the larger pile in the living room and then bring them into the bedroom making sure to grab boards from a variety of places in the pile so that I'm not grabbing all from one box this also contributes to the random look in the end then from there I would plan out my entire row of boards making sure that I was happy with the overall look of the row before actually nailing anything into place total this job took me a day to completely prep the floor which included the baseboards the carpet foam removing tack strips and such and then three days to lay the hardwood flooring a lot of that was me taking my time figuring out what to do making sure that everything was coming together nice and snug but also this was a lot of hard work primarily on my lower back so you might be able to speed up the process some but if you're working alone and don't have a lot of experience then I would plan anywhere from three to five days for the project sometimes I would run into the trouble using the longer boards that it would have a slight bow in it to take out the bow I would screw down a two by scrap that I had in my scrap bin and very carefully use a flat bar to pry in between the board and that tube material I would use my left hand to hold the board in place well using my right foot to hold the nailer in place then use my right hand to trigger the nailer eventually you're gonna get to the other side of the room where you're not going to be able to use your nailer and you're gonna have to go back to using a 16 gauge nailer on the rose I could get away with it instead of face nailing I would instead shoot and nail diagonally into the tongue whenever you get to your very last row you are gonna be on the hook for face nailing it along with renting the nailer and mallet I also purchased the rubber flooring acessory you've seen me use as well as this metal flooring accessory and this tool is great for hooking onto the end of the boards also something else from my experience my room is not exactly square and there was around three eighths of an inch difference from one end of this wall to the other and I compensated for that by using shorter pieces in this last row and ripping them down to slightly different widths when it was time to move into the closet I treated it very much like the initial starter row I wanted a continuous row from the inside of the closet to outside in the main room so I first figured out what I needed to rip down that very first board inside of the closet so that the second row would line up continuously with the board on the outside of the car event after facing this board into place and making sure that second row was indeed gonna line up then I continued the same exact process that I did outside of the room and you can see here what I mean by continuous rows from outside of the room into closet throughout the entire project the very last board in any row I would make sure to cut off the end of the board with the groove on it but instead of scrapping this piece I would then take it and use it as my very first board in the next row making sure to place the cut edge up against the wall which left the groove end exposed to accept the next piece alright let's talk about door jams you can cut the flooring as best you can and just put it up against the door jams however a different method is to undercut for to cut off the bottom of the door jambs so that the flooring could actually slide underneath it I have a Japanese pulse also that's what I used in order to undercut the door jams and to keep my saw going in at a nice consistent angle I would rest my saw on top of a scrap piece of flooring to act as a guide and you can see that once the door jams are undercut then the flooring will be able to slide right underneath it getting to the very end of my room I once again how to resort to face nailing the boards and I'll warn you now that completing the last few pieces will probably take more time than nailing down five full rows however be patient because if you get to this point you're almost done and this is a good time to bring up that I chose three quarters of an inch material so that it would come out flush with the existing floor that leads into the bathroom as well as the main room so be sure to keep that in mind when picking out your flooring after getting the transitional pieces down that goes into the bathroom I then put in the last few transitional pieces that will go into the living room and I must say I am very pleased with how everything turned out big THANK YOU to Lumber Liquidators for sponsoring this video if you have a flooring project coming up and want to help support my channel then please check out the link down below now we'll all of these steps involved are technically easy it is still very much farm work however this is my very first window up and I know that if I can do it through so can you but that is it for this one I hope that you enjoyed it see you next time [Music]

Channel: April Wilkerson

Views: 2,950,495

Rating: 4.8411384 out of 5

Keywords: hardwood flooring, how to install hardwood floor, laying down flooring, undercut door jams, tongue and groove flooring, lumber liquidators, hardwood, flooring, installation, diy, lumber, floors, wood, pine

Id: xoRWdCfKY10

Length: 10min 42sec (642 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 19 2017