What is this all About?

These are personal notes on installing 1600 sq ft of pecan, engineered hardwood flooring in our house in early 2008. This included applying the flooring over different substrates, particularly, T&G plywood sub floors, concrete, and two stairways. Basically, all carpeting in the house and some tile were replaced with hardwood flooring. This was a first time hardwood flooring installation for me, although I am not a stranger to these kinds of tasks. I have replaced floor sheet goods, laid 400 sq ft of tile, and installed a floating laminate floor. In addition, to typical house maintenance chores and replacements, I have over the years remodeled our kitchen, three baths, and done all the interior work on a single room house addition.

What makes this different is the magnitude of the task. It covered seven rooms and seven closets.

What makes this different than other installation guides? Several things. The purpose here is twofold: 1. Provide a source to set down all the work details to remind me of what I did in case I ever need to do it again. 2. Since I needed to go that far, I decided to go a bit further and organize it for others to view. I learned a lot and just maybe someone else might benefit from my personal observations and problems I ran into.

Keep in mind that this is a personal home project. I am sure anyone who reads this will find that my discussion suffers from a narrow range of techniques and methods on floor laying that were unique to the problems in our house. However, in preparing myself for the task, I noted many discussions where people were faced with similar problems. Sometimes the problems were answered to my benefit as well, sometimes not. So I believe I can at least offer a perspective on some points that I suspect will be generally useful to a portion of other do-it-yourselfers.

MY comments often have details that you will not find in standard installation discussions or brochures. I spent a long time reading, thinking, and finally executing this flooring project. In some cases, I have gone into deeper discussion than I needed to just describe the task. The discussion hopefully provides an idea of the depth of the problems which I had to resolve and some options. Of course, always keep in mind that I do not classify myself as an expert, just your typical homeowner trying to save cash by d-i-y.

Also don't expect a one stop technique and instruction course on floor laying. I gloss over the details of some techniques because there are many excellent internet sources describing the details, often with excellent pictures and diagrams. For example, I will describe coping saw cuts for trim, but I do not show detailed pictures of how to do it. There are quite a few sites that you can read on your own to understand this technique.

If some of the way I handled things turns out to be really useful, or very obscure for you, I would appreciate if if you drop me an email (see the end of this page). Helping others makes me feel like I have accomplished a bit more.

My starting information came from digesting a huge amount of information from the internet. Mining the web for resources leads mostly to information from manufacturers and distributors. The manufacturers tend to give specifications and some general installation points, but gloss over the nagging problems that you stare at for minutes, hours, or days trying to figure out a decent solution. Flooring distributors are better at helpful installation information, but I still found many cases where the helpful information stopped just before the point where I really needed advice, like when trimming or doing stairs.

Forums and usenet posts where another useful source of information, but you pay for what you get. You have to read a lot of them to understand the pros and cons of the issues. Everyone has their own opinion and some fixes can be highly specific. As I have already indicated, that is true for the discussion here as well.

The Start

For over a year my wife and I discussed replacing carpet with hardwood floors. Finally with a long Christmas and New Year holiday break looming in 2007, the deadline was set for the end of December, and my wife began looking in earnest at what she wanted.

 While my wife worked the aesthetic aspects to death and ran around getting samples and looking for just the right wood, I worked on deciding what type hardwood construction to go with. There are two basic hardwood flooring constructions, solid and engineered. If we went with exotic hardwoods, then engineered seemed like the most affordable route, but my wife ruled out early most of the exotic woods as too dark, too light, or too textured for her tastes. Nevertheless, the choices to be made were the cause of many hours of reading opinions and personal considerations. Some of the aspects that needed to be addressed: What thickness of wood and the construction type? Both characteristics are connected with the further question of what is the likelihood of refinishing the floor later on. Especially with engineered hardwoods, wear layer is a critical decision to make. Even standard 3/4" solid hardwood has only a 3/16" wear layer and can be refinished somewhere between three to five times. Most engineered floors have a 1/32" to 1/6" wear layer. An 1/8" layer might be refinished twice and a three times at a stretch. Forget refinishing with 1/16" or less; the floor will end up being tossed or covered over. You may also want to consider a floating floor with a thin wear layer for easy removal, if you like to remodel your house a lot. The 3/4" material more typically has a 1/8" thick wear layer, but not always. Also, for engineered hardwood, the number of plys are important for stability. Anywhere from three to seven ply engineered planks are common. More plys usually translates to more expensive products and less expansion and contraction. Lets face it, you get what you pay for here. The cheap stuff is cheap for a reason. Will it work? Again, it depends on your future remodeling intentions.

Two other factors come into play with the type of flooring construction. One is the size of the strips or planks. With solid hardwood, anything over 3 1/2" is usually recommended to be screwed down at the edges because of the high tendency for the wood to warp or cup. Quality engineered hardwoods should minimize this problem. Solid hardwoods also have greater expansion and contraction issues than engineered hardwood. Another consideration is whether the wood is unfinished or prefinished. Both constructions can come either way. Pre-finished has the advantage of simplicity of installation and the disadvantage that unevenness of the floor with be evident in the final result. Another disadvantage is that the face nails will be more conspicuous. Sanding in place levels the unevenness out and minimizes showing where the boards are faced nailed. However, sanding and finishing can be a touchy operation and must be done very carefully and under the proper conditions. It takes time to do it right. Prefinsihing also means a high degree of uniformity in the finish itself.

Then there is the type of installation to consider, glue down, click, or nail/staple down or floating? With some types of flooring any of the methods can be used (click is specific). The fastening issue gets into what tools you have available and your own personal skills and need to change out to a different floor later on.

My wife decided that she liked plank style boards better than smaller strips, such as the common 2 1/4" strips. Since I did not want to screw down edges, that moved our options toward engineered planks. Another consideration is that we (well mainly me) are fairly rough on floors. I typically wear shoes around the house, because I hate constantly changing shoes as I move in and out of the house doing chores or working outside. We don't have any more pets and the kids are sort of on their own, so that helped. I also decided I wanted a decent wear layer and a floor that sounded and felt solid. We have Pergo laminate in one room, and walking on it sounds hollow even though it is over concrete. I did install it with all the proper sheeting underneath. To some extent, the hollow sound is just a function of the thickness of the wood. All these decisions began to lock me in to 3/4" thick engineered products. There were several companies that had the characteristics and I began to zero in on choices. My wife first liked maple because we both wanted light wood. Our house is fairly open and light; we wished to keep it that way. However, after a while, maple lost its appeal because she deemed it too light and untextured. Natural oak was the next choice, but red oak or white oak? Red was too reddish and the grain was a bit too strong, white was to orange and also had a very distinct grain. Ash was too much like oak and most other woods, such as the exotics, or stained woods were too dark. However, while browsing samples at Home Depot, we ran across a sample of pecan from the company that I had been focused on as having a reasonable quality engineered product. My wife really liked it and brought the sample home. Finally, after about two months of going back and forth, in a matter of one day we had the choice out of nowhere. We ended up with 1600 sq ft of prefinished Natural Pecan (Capella Standard) 3/4" x 4 1/2" planks with a 1/6" wear layer. Although all woods show color variations and texture variations, pecan has a fairly large range of color. The grain is generally muted, but the wood can have a lot of character and color variation. This is true even for Standard (Select). Even though manufacturers warn you about this, for pecan it is quite true.

The House

Our house is multilevel with bedrooms and baths on the highest level, the main level with the kitchen, eating area/sun room, living and dining room, and a lower level with a family room, bath, and office area. These areas are separated by two staircases each with seven steps. There is also a fourth or basement level where my workshop is located.

Plan of Attack
Throughout the entire decision phase there was a running battle about installation. My wife wanted a professional installer. It was not because I would do a lousy job. She knows my work. But the length of time for me to install and the attendant disruption of the house were the big issues for her. I suspect that this is an argument that is not unique to us. The prices for installation ranged from $3.19 to $4.30 a sq ft. For 1600 sq ft of flooring and a nail down installation, that was a big hit. Of course, this did not include sub floor installation. In fact, when she asked the people at Home Depot about installation cost, the answer came back with what I had already learned for other jobs. Just double the cost of the materials. That helped sway the argument in favor of me doing the job.

At the start of our search for flooring, I measured every room and closet in our house. The information was put into an Excel workbook to calculate sq ft for every area. In addition, I used a freeware house plan program and generated a floor plan for the three levels of our house. Using a vector graphics program, I then converted this to something a bit more useful for me. This extra work turned out to be especially useful when doing the Family Room sub floor(see below).

A worksheet was also used to compare options and keep a running total of all the parts and costs, including the trim. The worksheet was particularly useful when it was discovered that all the trim would not be reused. It was easy to add up the wall distances to determine how may linear feet of trim to buy. You would be surprised how often I find myself referring to this worksheet of house dimensions. Do it right once, and the value shows itself really quickly.

Since my wife changed her mind several times on just how much of the house would end up as wood floor, the worksheet also made it easy to instantly keep up with her changes.

A couple of other decisions need to be made right at the start. Should I use felt or rosin paper? Both are common. Would there be an asphalt smell from felt? Since the primary reason for the paper or felt is as sound barrier rather than moisture barrier I decided rosin paper is easier to work with and a bit thinner. It also was conveniently found at the local Home Depot. Another decision that was somewhat more difficult is what to do about room transitions and interfaces with brick. The family room has a brick facade fireplace that runs along an entire wall. What about transitions between kitchen and bathroom tile and the new floor, or between bedrooms and hallway? Initially, I thought the best approach was to purchase T molding for the transitions, and so purchased one heck of a lot of very expensive T trim. However, on second thought I decided to try and avoid the room transitions and carry the hardwood flooring through from one room to another, e.g., bedroom to hallway to bedroom. Aesthetically, one continuous floor through out a level looks much better in our estimation. The downside as I found out was the extra time to do this. Transitions between hardwood floors and tile or other types of flooring required either T molding or a threshold piece (but a bit different way of handling this in several cases.)