We decided to pull the trigger on replacing the old carpet in my studio/office with hardwood floors. After a lot of research and contacting a bunch of different flooring outfits (Home Depot, National Floors Direct, Riverhead Building Supply), we decided we were up to the challenge of installing something ourselves with wide-plank pine boards from Lumber Liquidators. Youtube has excellent videos on the installation, and we had particularly good advice from our friend Brett.
Here we are at step 1: Pulling up the old carpet. This took us one evening to complete and was not too difficult, but very dusty. The hardest part was prying up the little strips of nails that held the carpet in place. We ran into trouble when we got to the built-in bookcase you see in the corner, we couldn't get the carpet out from under it.
I can't tell you how liberating it was to get the carpet out! Even the plywood subfloor looked like an improvement!
Here you can see that we decided to cut the bottom off the built-in bookcase. The goal is for a desk/counter to run the full width of the room, and the bookcase was in the way. We did this with a Multi Tool (or, as Brett says, a "silly saw"). Really we just cut the inside edge off the bookcase and left the back and outside edge where they were. This left us with an ugly and uneven wall situation.
The flooring we got from Lumber Liquidators really is beautiful! Unfinished pine boards that are just over 8" wide (we were looking for wide planks), and it was only $1.79/square foot. It was almost absurd how much less that was than anywhere else we had looked. We also ordered underlayment, quarter-round, and t-moulding for the doorways. We stacked the wood inside the house and left it for about a week for it to acclimate to the appropriate humidity.
After pulling up the rug we ran the silly saw around the edges of the room to create a little space under the moulding at the base of the wall. We also could have pried the moulding off, but we were worried we'd do more damage that way.
After sweeping and vacuuming, we laid out the underlayment. This took all of about ten minutes. It had some adhesive along the edge, and we periodically hit it with the staple gun for good measure. You can also see in the picture above that I have started to put up white beadboard along the wall. This will cover the messy remains of the bookcase. I cut the beadboard panels to fit with the silly saw and was quite surprised by how dense and difficult to cut (and also nail into the wall) the beadboard is. Sturdy stuff.
Now it's time to lay boards! Note the fun tools: miter saw, air compressor, flooring stapler (rented from the Depot)... this was a gadget-heavy operation. Cutting the first board to fit in the doorway took some careful work with a circular saw.
Nate's pretty pumped to get this show on the road. It was a lot of prep. Once we started putting boards down, things went more quickly. By this time I had also put up the rest of the beadboard. I filled in the joints with spackle but learned later from Hank that I should have used caulk to avoid cracks.
By Sunday night, the floor was laid! Apologies for the poor lighting, it makes the room look yellow.
I forgot to take pictures but there were a couple more steps before coating the floor. Upon Brett's advice, we decided to secure the boards to the subfloor with a screw and bung technique in addition to the regular floor staples that were in the edge of each board. We ordered a bung-cutter bit for the cordless drill from Amazon and put two screws in the end of each board, covered with bungs. It was a little tedious but has a nice, nautical feeling and makes us a little more confidant about the security of our 8" wide boards. The next step in the process was to sand the floor. We rented a floor sander locally for half the day and with such a small room, it went really quickly. The hardest part was getting the sander up and down the stairs, it weighed a ton!
After much deliberation and testing stains and sealants on wood scraps, we decided on a clear satin finish polyurethane. We applied it with rollers and used a brush around the edges of the room. We even attempted to pour it into a few knots in the wood, with moderate success. After 6 or 8 hours we did another coat, and then a third.
So. Weekend 1 we did prep. Weekend 2 the boards went down. Weekend 3 we sealed the floor. We're pretty excited about the results!
