Home > About Me > Flooring

Call us crazy, but after my graduation and before our wedding, Ben and I decided to install hardwood flooring throughout the first floor of our new townhouse. Here is an (unfinished) account of our first foray into the world of home improvement! Many thanks to Mom and Dad B. for the gift of the raw materials as a wedding present.

The first step in installing new flooring is to remove the old flooring. Simple, right? We budgeted about a day to remove the carpet from the approximately 500 square foot downstairs of our new townhouse.

Oh, how naive we were! This picture shows how the carpet was attached to our concrete slab floor. The carpet padding (the red stuff) was simply glued to the concrete and pulled up fairly easily. The carpet was attached to the floor by tackboards at the edges. Once you pulled the carpet from the tackboards with a hammer, it was simple to pull the carpet up, but our berber carpet only cut easily in one direction, so dividing it into dumpster-sized rolls was non-trivial. The tackboards were nailed directly to the concrete, so we pried them up with the pry bar. This part was annoying but not terribly difficult. Be sure to wear eye protection because when you pry nails out of concrete they really go flying.

Safety equipment: Eye protection is a must to protect against flying tackboard nails, and also for using tools like the belt sander and table saw. Leather gloves are a good idea when grabbing the carpet to pull it up or throw it out because nails and tacks from the tackboard get stuck in the carpet.

Knee pads are a neccessity. You will need them when you're pulling up the carpet because you'll be resting in a pool of nails and tacks that will stick you. They're also nice thing to have when you're crawling around on the floor installing the flooring. We weren't too happy with our kneepads; the straps bothered the backs of our knees. If you're rich, you might try several kinds so that you can swap them out when one pair gets irritating.

Featured in this photo are, from right to left, some putty knives for doling out adhesive; pliers for general usefulness; a flashlight for something-or-other; a big hammer for pounding the chisel to the right; a 3" painter's scraper with extra blades; a pry bar (which is a smaller version of a "crow bar") to pick nails out of the floor, and a small hammer (also to pull nails up).

Blue 3M tape (this is really what it's called!) is masking tape that doesn't leave residue, so you can use it to clamp together the pieces of flooring as you're gluing them down. Jasco is adhesive remover that cleans up any drips of glue you might get on the wood as you're laying the floor down. This type of adhesive remover, unfortunately, does not remove old dry adhesive -- we tried to use it to dissolve the glue that held down the old parquet in the kitchen, but it only made things worse.

I'm not sure what we used the drill for, but the extra sanding belts were for the belt sander we bought. We used that to try to get white paint off the edges of the floor (it probably fell there when the builders spray painted the walls when they built the house 15 years ago). The adhesive directions say to get all the paint up before gluing the floor down, and we tried our darndest, but we weren't able to remove the paint completely. So far, the floor's been in for six months and we haven't had any problems due to the paint (or anything else).

The funny-looking metal spatulas are for spreading the glue out. The notches are precisely sized so that you put the right amount of glue down. We were given several different recommended notch sizes, so we decided to go with the biggest (1/4" x 1/4" square) in the hopes that more glue would mean a sturdier floor. We think this much glue was probably overkill.

The strait-line is for making a "starting point" in the middle of the room. Ben bought the kind with red chalk, but it turns out that red -- and every other color except for blue -- stains, so you might want to go with blue. If you can borrow a third person to snap the line, that would be useful; it was hard to do with just two.

When the 3" scraper didn't work to get the old adhesive off the kitchen floor, we tried a giant scraper. The one on the right is a 7" razor blade and the one next to it is just a metal scraper (not razor-sharp). It would have been great if these had worked, but the 3" scraper turned out to be faster than either of these because removing the glue required a lot of force and a low angle of attack. It took me quite literally 10 hours of sitting on the kitchen floor, which is about 10'x10', to scrape the glue off, and that doesn't inclue actually removing the parquet or any of the time Ben spent scraping next to me. This was the worst part of the job.

We finally, finally got the floor prepared for the bamboo. The plastic drop clothes are to prevent dust from the belt sander from polluting the rest of the house.

This is how the kitchen floor looked after our toil. Some of the brown coloring of the adhesive remained, but it at least felt smooth. This is as good as we could get it. So far, it seems good enough; we haven't had any problems.

I'm not sure why you're suppossed to start in the middle of the room, but you are, so we did. During this exercise, we discovered that the walls in our house are not square! It was impossible to snap a line equidistant from the far wall (with the fireplace on it) along the length of the room. This was unfortunate because we wanted to place the starter boards an integer number of board-widths away from at least one wall to save us from having to "rip" an extra wall's worth of boards. Also, when you do have to rip boards, uneven walls mean that you sometimes have to make slighly triangular boards, which is a real pain.

Here I am laying out a set of test boards near the patio doors. In places like this, you're suppossed to leave 1 1/4" of space between the end of the board and the door so that you can fit an "end cap" in (hopefully we'll have a picture of that soon, but it's on order). Next to walls, you need to leave 1/4" between the board and the wall so that the wood has room to expand and contract with variations in the weather.

Here's the kitchen just after we finished it at four o'clock in the morning. Blue 3M tape is clamping the boards together to remove cracks, and the cardboard is spread out so that we don't have to walk directly on the wood. We had a tendency to step in the glue and we wanted to avoid tracking it onto the new floor.

The room slowly took shape. Here we finished the majority of the main living area.

These are the glue-tools drying after a hard day's work. At first glance, we thought we'd have to replace the tools after just one day of work, but fear not! After drying overnight, the glue peels right off the scrapers and putty knives, and they're good as new. (Of course, buying a couple extra 97 cent putty knives is probably not a bad idea anyway.)

Here I am laying wood in the corner by the fireplace. This is one of the areas that is definitely not square, so it poses interesting challenges. Note the cable wires hanging from the mantle; those will go back between the floor and the wall when the glue dries, and will eventually be covered up entirely by the 3/4" round trim that goes around the edges of the room.

Here is a large chunk of the floor being held together with blue tape.

The floor is looking great now! Here is a view towards the porch.

Here we are with the majority of the floor installed. It's starting to look good! I need to take another picture. We've not got everything except the trim and the end caps in, and there's furniture in the room. It looks great! Check back soon for more pictures.

The stairs took us a long time to figure out. There are no directions for doing this stuff! I think our "hacked" solution looks pretty good, though! We used 3/4" quarter-round on the edge of the stair (bottom right), and we're in the process of putting more quarter-round trim on the edges of the stairs. The front of the stairs is "stair nosing", which means a bamboo piece that has a rounded edge. The stairs are a work in progress.

There are special pieces of bamboo you can buy to put in front of doors. Unfortunately, the piece we were given is warped, and we're having trouble getting it to stay glued down. We've tried liquid nails and Ben tried superglue (???), but even weighting it down with a bucket of stones doesn't make it stay. We'll get back to you on this one.

The trim is no picnic. Here's a spot that Ben ingeniously crafted in the bathroom. Our house has this very elegant curved moulding corners of the walls, but it's a real pain to put trim around.

We used the "door" pieces next to the fireplace. Here, they look great and stayed down without any hassle.