Do It Yourself Flooring – ORC Week 5

We are getting SO CLOSE to the end of the One Room Challenge, and while last week I was set back with some health issues, this week I fully recovered all of my lost progress and then some!

Intro | Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4

Now, as you all know, I have been focusing the majority of my energy on the cabin bed build. I expected it to take me the longest and I was exactly right. I am still not done! I’m pretty close, though – I started putting the finishing touches on most of the panels this week in my “spare time” – which means Minwax finishing wax, giving my piece a hand-rubbed look. Plus, it gives the white of the cabin bed a bit of a toning down, since the wax itself is a little yellow.

Aside from more progress on this thing, though, we made great headway on the actual room transformation! Our little girl got to spend some time with Mimi while we worked like maniacs for a few days straight. So what did we accomplish this week?

1. Ripping out the baseboards
2. Ripping out the carpet
3. Re-paining the room
4. Laying down the new flooring
5. Installing the new baseboards

With that being said, I figured I would share my own personal how-to for installing our beautiful, hand scraped acacia engineered hardwood flooring. Fun times ahead!

Materials and Tools:

• Click and lock flooring
• Baseboards (if you can’t save yours)
• Tape Measure
• Pencil
• Pry Bar
• Hammer
• Moisture Meter
• Moisture Barrier and/or Underlayment
• Underlayment Tape
• Door Jamb Saw
• Chisel (Most Likely)
• Spacers
• Tapping Block and Hammer
• Table Saw or Circular Saw
• Miter Saw
• Wood Glue
• Jigsaw
• Air Compressor and Hose
• Finish Nailer
• Finish Nails – 1 1/2 inch
  

Step 1: Measure!
You will need to get the total square footage of all of the area you are working with. Length times width. Plus, on top of that, add in an additional 10% for hiccups and super short cuts.

Step 2: Order Your Flooring
Decide on your flooring and order the amount (including that 10%) that you might need. For our flooring, we opted for hand scraped Acacia engineered hardwood.This means also ordering your underlay – we used Pergo Gold for ours, which provides a moisture barrier and underlay/cushion. Everything we purchased, we found at Lowe’s. We lucked out with this project and have two boxes of flooring and two unopened underlay sections, so that’s probably over $250 worth of refunds! Winning!

Step 3: Acclimate
Your new floors need time to get used to their new home. Let them sit in the room they will be going into for at least 48 hours to adjust to the humidity of that area.

Step 4: Rip It Up
If you have carpet, you want to get that nasty stuff out of there. I was shocked at what was gathered under our carpets! After 10 years of use (I’m guessing it wasn’t new when we moved in), it was nasty. My recommendation is to definitely invest in a good face mask before doing this – I did not and it irritated my bronchitis, giving me 3 months of coughing when I changed our master bedroom’s flooring out. For the nursery, though, I invested in a respirator and I didn’t cough even one time!

To do the carpet removal is actually quite easy. First, you use a slim pry bar and a hammer to get a little leverage behind the baseboards and pry them up. I broke most of mine, but you could try to save them! Then, you just find a little corner and pull it up. Easy.

Some people say that the click and lock flooring can be installed over other types of flooring (like tile), but my personal preference is tearing it up down to the sub floor. I don’t know why, but that’s just me.

Step 5: Clean It Up
It is likely you found some pretty interesting stuff under there. These carpets were 10 years old probably, so there were all sorts of fun surprises. You are going to want to remove all of the little tack strips along the edge of the room and vacuum/mop up those sub floors. You want the sub floor to be CLEAN, LEVEL AND DRY. Whip out the moisture meter and make sure. We worked off of concrete sub floor, so it had to be super dry. This is also a good moment to use your door jamb saw to cut away some of your door frame so that your flooring can squeeze underneath it. We used the tap block to help with that and it seemed to work very well.

Step 6: Lay the Underlay/Moisture Barrier
We worked from left to right and put down each strip side by side, ensuring that they were wall to wall. We followed their instructions very closely – luckily there were some included!

For the Pergo Gold Underlay, there is a fold over part that connects the strips that serves as the seam tape. We used the underlay tape on seams where that tape was not available – if we had to cut to fit (closets, for example).

Step 7: Lay Your First Row
We followed the plan of laying the planks vertical to the longest part of the room, which usually aligned with the sunshine direction as it came through the windows. You use the spacers to maintain 1/4″ on all sides. The first row is pretty tricky – as is the second and possibly the third. Then it gets easier.

Step 8: Lay Subsequent Rows
Ok, I am not going to lie – we tried our best to follow the “best practices” for this. They said to use the short cut end of the last piece you used in the row before the subsequent row. This would make sure that the joints would not line up. Then, we also read that there was a pattern to follow, since each of these were variable lengths.

What ended up happening was that we made sure that each joint had at least 6 inches of solid wood plank on either side and each end piece was at least 8 inches long. We picked patterns not from various boxes, but by what we liked to see. So – see? Definitely not professionals, but we are highly satisfied with our work.

Even though they claimed it was not necessary, we still put down a line of wood glue on each joint, so that they would hold firm together as the floor floated around. When you click the planks into place, you will need to tap them firmly into each other using the block and hammer. That way they really get settled in.

Step 9: The Final Row
When you get to the last, satisfying row of flooring, you will find that often it is not going to be the same width as the rest! Frustrating as it may be – you may wish to be done – you need to rip the boards lengthwise to fit into that last space. We did not have a table saw, but had a circular saw. So, we would measure the space from the last board’s ending point (not the click and lock area) to the wall and subtract a quarter of an inch. Then we would mark a line along the board at that measurement and use the circular saw to cut it to fit. It worked wonderfully and my husband only almost cut himself one time out of all of our rooms of flooring. 🙂

Step 10: Baseboards
We painted the room first, but hey – if you like your wall colors, go for the baseboards! You can even add quarter rounds if you want them. We purchased new baseboards in contractor packs at Lowe’s. I also went ahead and got some white semi-gloss paint and painted them. They are white in the store because they are primed, but I wanted them to look really white and nice. So, I painted all of the baseboards before cutting them to fit.

You take out the spacers and measure your lengths. If you are using your old baseboards, then not much will be needed other than remembering how you pulled them up. If you use a numbering system that should work. However, if you are going new, you will need to work in a certain direction, measuring and cutting one at a time. That worked for me. I started with the tiniest baseboard section – probably half an inch. I cut that piece and ended up gluing it because the nail gun just blew it up.

As you can see, my husband’s air compressor is a bit overkill for what I was using it for! He uses it for a lot of automotive work, so it is perfect for him – but lugging that through the house is something else!

At each corner, you will need to adjust the miter settings on your saw to make sure you can have a beautiful little corner. Nail them in with your air powered nail gun (finishing nails).

Here is a quick tutorial on that.

So, your baseboards are in and you repeat that process for quarter rounds if you (like me) needed to hide a little bit of a short flooring plank. Or maybe you just like the look! Then, you fill in the nail holes with spackle or wood filler and touch up the paint. Final step is to caulk the seams to make it beautifully seamless!

The finished product is a beautiful, warm to the touch floor – and so far it’s a winner in our household!