This weekend we finally made some forward progress – installing new hardwood floor in the kitchen and den. It was also the longest time we’ve spent working on the house at one time – 33 hours from Friday night through Sunday night. Despite being extremely sore and tired, we’re very satisfied with the result.
In order to let the wood acclimate to the house we purchased half of the flooring on Wednesday night and the other half on Friday. Friday night we also started preparing the kitchen subfloor – vacuuming and laying down tar paper.
Saturday morning, after renting the manual floor nailer, we started removing some of the bad flooring in the dining room and all the flooring in the den. Most of the den floor was very badly stained – there were few boards that were worth saving.
Saturday afternoon and evening we started installing the new kitchen floor. The first few rows are the most time consuming because you have to make sure that they are square in the room and you have to face nail them (including recessing each one so that you can sand the area later). We found out quickly that red oak is an extremely hard, dense wood. There are quite a few bent nails in our trash today!
Once we had about 3 rows installed, the nailer was able to fit. Chris did all the nailing while I laid out the wood and cut the end piece of each row. At the end of Saturday evening we had about 1/3 of the kitchen floor complete.
Sunday morning we completed the floor in the kitchen (except for the rows we will need to face nail near the outside door – we’ll complete this later this week). In the afternoon, we prepared the den floor. This included screwing down the subfloor on each joist, vacuuming, and putting down tar paper. The rest of Sunday was spent installing the floor in the den.
We are so excited to finally have something to show for all our hard work. Our next big task is to sand all the floors – that could take awhile!
Hey guys the floor looks GREAT! Your house is gonna rock! :)
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