I've done a lot of wood working and I've installed a laminate floating floor. What do I need? How hard to do my upstairs? Buy prefinished or finish? Real hardwood and not laminate.
I have the saws and a compressor. Which nail gun?
I've done a lot of wood working and I've installed a laminate floating floor. What do I need? How hard to do my upstairs? Buy prefinished or finish? Real hardwood and not laminate.
I have the saws and a compressor. Which nail gun?
I used the harbor freight nail gun for my whole house, I had one jam. Not bad at all for Like 100$ with a coupon. I would defiantly go prefinished real hardwood. I have oak upstairs and hickory downstairs.
If you are not experienced at finishing floors, prefinished will give a better finish. However, you can't get the dead perfect, zero tolerance, like glass edge matching with prefinished. That is the realm of sand-in-place.
Prefinished either has slight discrepancies in the match, or uses a micro-bevel (tiny groove, so the match is insignificant).
Don't use a trim nailer or stapler. This will encourage you to face nail, or not set the nail against the tongue well.
You want a flooring nailer:
There are air powered versions, and manual. They are a bit expensive- like in the $500 range. But they can be easily rented from your local tool rental store.
Don't use anything that fires by pulling a trigger. You actually want a tool you hit with a heavy hammer- it sets the flooring tighter.
I am a fan of the manual ones, not the air powered ones. They work perfectly fine, don't really use more energy than their air-powered counterparts, and free you from being tied by an umbilical hose. You also don't have to listen to the compressor making noise all day. Manual floor nailers also let you really whack at the piece if you need to add a little more oomph- air powered ones will drive with the same force no matter what you do.
Good luck!
I agree about prefinished vs unfinished. A friend did his house in prefinished hardwood, ours was done by pros in bare wood. The grooves between each board are really obvious. He also ended up with a wood finish that looked spectacular in small samples but was a bit overdone in place. Since we got to see the entire floor before we decided on a stain, we had a better idea of how it would look. Ours just looks better.
I'm glad I didn't have to do it, but the end result is nicer with sand-in-place. That said, I know the sanding can be done DIY, my parents did it when I was a kid. I don't think there's any difference in the installation process up to the finishing stage.
Just did 1000 sqft of prefonished from Lumber liquidators. I used the ~$150 Norge air nailer they sell. I looks good, finish was consistent box to box with the variation we expected from the wood. I only had 4 bad pieces in 30 boxes. The nailer worked awesome with the cleats they sell. Its onky been in for 2 months so I can't speak to durability though we scratched it up good puting the fridge in. Its not as had as I would have liked but that was our choice in the material. Overall I am pleased for the price we paid (<2.90/sq-ft. Including transition pieces). The quotes we for for post finished were nearly $5500 for same wood species. Install was easy I'll get a picture up soon. The edges are obvious but that's the look we wanted.
I'm about to sand the old wood floors in my rental later today and my current house has pretty good prefinished stuff. I much prefer the old school stuff. It doesn't give a crap about water or traffic while the new stuff has to be babied. Putting the coating on yourself gets it down in between the pieces where the water would go where the prefinished stuff only has the coating on the top. If I ever do a full installation myself I will probably use prefinished that can tolerate a few sandings so I get the ease of installation with the tougher surface later on.
I've done 3/4" prefinished in my mothers' house and it looks great, gets lots of compliments and has held up well to 10 years of high traffic and big dogs.
I've done 5/16" prefinished in my own house. It goes down with a pneumatic stapler I bought on eBay for $50 and being thinner I didn't have to remove/replace doors and trim. MUCH easier to install and looked exactly the same.
The big difference is that you can only sand down the thinner flor once while the old school 3/4" can probably take three standings before it gets to the cleats.
I am a fan of prefinished for one more thing..... The number of coats of finish. Sand in place you get maybe two coats and hope no dust or debris gets in it while it's drying. Factory gets a dozen or more in a dust free environment and even gets baked on to harden it further.
I did 1000 sf prefinished 3/4" hickory. Looks great. I have a bostich floor nailer that's a combo hammer and compressor driven. i liked the extra punch from the compressor when space gets tight near walls. Thought about underlayment yet? There's lots of options and pricing. You're welcome to borrow the nailer. Looks like you're just a few suburbs away from me
Definitely use cleats (nails) and not staples. Home Depot rents flooring nailers for about $20/day.
I can walk you through how to polyurethane an unfinished floor, but it will require sanding. Small areas can be done with a palm sander and a gazillion pads. Large areas should have a floor sander. Do not get a drum sander, use a random orbital. Again... home depot rents.
Prefinished gets you an awesome finish with seams. Unfinished will get you a seamless installation, but then its on you to get a good finish. I used to give the floor refinishing class at Home Depot. I can walk you through it start to finish.
I did a pre-finished floor in a foyer once and was silently complaining about all the seams that will be there and allow water from shoes down in the cracks. When it was done, it looked so nice that I stopped caring. My mother, on the other hand, is a germophobe. She refuses to do any kind of tile or prefinished hardwood because she can't clean between the cracks.
An orbital sander is more DIY friendly, but it will cloud the grain. A drum sander will give more depth to the finish, but has a large learning curve to do well. Kind of like welding.
If you are the type of person who thinks Ikea wood furniture is beautiful, buy the pre-finished. If you think it looks like plastic, buy the unfinished.
If you have no experience finishing and have a wife who can see the difference in the quality of the finish between Ashley Furniture and Ethan Allen, hire a pro to sand.
Consider that thick floor (3/4") may require cutting the doors. If your house is post about 1980 and uses hollow core doors, you may not be able to.
I did my house in 1/2" prefinished engineered hardwood, it's oak laminated to a good quality backing. It went down nice and the gaps are fine, although they do change a little with the weather. I used a HF nailer and cleats, it worked fine. It's air powered but you use a hammer (included) to fire it and set the cleats. I think I had maybe 5-6 misfires out of about ~1100 square feet, not bad. The best part: I took two weeks to do it along with some other projects and sold the HF nailer at a $20 loss. That was cheaper than renting one by a long shot!
Do get some of those setting tools, they help when getting stubborn tongue and groove to go together.
I also found some plastic blocks at Home Depot which helped with that part of the job.
Thanks to the carpet, my doors were already high enough to miss. I did have to undercut the molding so the wood would fit underneath, that is done by using a scrap piece of flooring and a saw. Lay the scrap on the subfloor, push it against the molding then use the saw. I bought one of those Dremel Saw Max things, it went through four friggin' blades which were about $23 apiece. Sonofabitch. I complained, they sent me three blades but I am still pissed about the thing being marketed on the inkjet principle; sell 'em the tool cheap then burn 'em a new one on blades etc. My review:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R2YJ5XQNQJ383S/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt/177-5142967-7777859#R2YJ5XQNQJ383S
Thanks for the info. My neighbors had prefinished installed and the first thing I thought was I could see all the seams. In my first 1950 house I pulled up the shag and found the entire house was great shape HW so I filled in all the carpet tack holes and used a palm sander to clean up the entire house. Then I polyurethaned it all.
My house has mostly old 1/4" red oak floors, but the hallway is done with that horrible cheap floating laminate. The colour matches well, but I hate it and will eventually replace it. When I do, I'll replace it with unfinished red oak, and will sand and finish it myself. I've refinished almost all the old stuff with an orbital sander so I have no issues using a sander. It takes time, but then end result is totally worth it. pre0finished is the easy way out 
In reply to Curmudgeon:
I've been doing this for 39 years. I've tried virtually everything out there, including an industrial jamb saw.
I still use this:
It works as good as anything else I have tried. 
All that said, I berkeleyed up cutting a few of the door jambs higher for the new floor. Some have a gap up to 1/8". Any advice on how to remedy this w/o replacing the jamb?
In reply to ProDarwin:
Caulk.
I've never done a hardwood installation, but when we remodeled our building we wanted to leave the rustic look of the 114-year old floors while coating them to keep the dust down, as well as make them easier to clean. I used a mop with mildly soapy water and an industrial floor scrubber to clean them, then I rolled on clear polyurethane after they dried.
What I discovered mostly was how bad polyurethane smells - I cannot imagine trying to coat floors in a house you're living in. Maybe if you have a way to completely seal off the room, and the weather is nice enough you can keep the windows open for a week or two while the vapors vent out. That stuff is seriously nasty and takes a really long time to completely go away.
In reply to SVreX:
I got aggravated with the SawMax and bought one of those flush cut hand saws. The blade is reversible which is a big help.
There are some made with much thinner blades, they flex to achieve the offset. I'm not intelligent enough to use one of those properly.
OBTW, my mom used some of that Pergo floating floor in one house she had, I hated walking on it because it just did not feel 'solid'. I know that's sort of the idea (it's why the foam goes down first) but it ain't for me. I also did laminate for a friend a little while back, I wouldn't use it myself but she's been very happy with it. Warning: that stuff will ruin any table saw blades that don't have carbide teeth!
I also looked at some of the inexpensive 'hardwood' and 'bamboo' flooring available at LowesDepot, it's priced in the $1.89/ sq ft range. The colors etc looked good, it was also nice and thick (5/8" IIRC) so I grabbed a couple of samples. My contractor brother came by and looked at them, said 'damn this looks pretty nice', then ran his thumbnail across the face of one sample and scratched it right down to the base wood. 
If you held a sample end up to the light, you could see the base wood, a VERY thin layer of 'color', then a thin layer of clear. It turns out it is made thus: a cheap grade of wood is planed and shaped, then what is essentially a giant inkjet printer puts the 'hardwood' or 'bamboo' pattern on, that is then covered with a layer of cheap polyurethane that just will not stand up to traffic. So, beware that crap.
I wound up getting my flooring from a local company which sells to contractors; I went through my brother's company to get it. IIRC it was something like $2.89/sq ft.
This thread is relevant to my interests.
Will engineered hardwood add value to a home the same way true hardwood will?
Thoughts\experiences on underlayment?
Hardwood is one of those things which people either like or don't. I can't count the number of houses I've been in where the beautiful hardwood floors were covered with carpet. Ugh. I detest carpet but there's a lot of people who prefer carpet to hardwood so there is no hard and fast rule to the value side of things, although typically true hardwood does add more value than engineered. Don't expect to recover the full value of your expenditure either way, though. Laminates don't add anything, they are viewed as cheap substitutes and that came straight from my realtor. I know I did not like the houses I looked at which had laminates, they just don't look right to me.
Underlayment: my house already has 5/8" plywood (not OSB) subfloors so no problem there. OSB is more flexible than plywood so thicker is better to avoid flexing. That doesn't mean if the floors in your house are OSB you automatically need to reinforce them or yank them up, just be aware they can flex more.
I have seen plastic vapor barrier; I used good ol' 15# roofing felt (tar paper). That's because if the subfloor does flex the plastic stuff can squeak.
I used tar paper also. Works great, way cheaper than the fluffy "advanced" underlayments they will try to sell you.
Best advice I can give with regards to squeaking: When you have removed the original floor and before you do anything else, screw down the subfloor to the joists.
I also used 15# roofing felt.
My 1950 house had roofing felt under the HW. Worked ok then.....
In reply to Curmudgeon:
OSB is not suitable for a subfloor for anything. It was an industry standard for a short time in the '70's, but only when the standard was to do 2 separate layers of "subfloor", totally 1 1/4" thick. It is not used anymore (except for people who don't know any better buying from Home Depot).
There ARE particle based materials that LOOK a little like OSB used for subfloors. They go by names like Advantech, TruFlor, SturdiFloor, Plytsanium, etc. These are not OSB, and they are FAR superior to plywood.
If the plastic is actually a vapor barrier, its a bad idea. It will collect condensate between wood layers, and rot one of them. A vapor barrier does not belong sandwiched between 2 layers of wood. It belongs on the warm/ moist side of the assembly.
You'll need to log in to post.
