Flooring is one of the most important factor of creating a beautiful and comfortable house to live in. There are several type of floors, including hardwood flooring. When you finally decide to use hardwood, it’s time to show you about how to installing hardwood flooring properly. Check this out!
1. Choosing the Type You’ll Need
There are two types of hardwood available to choose based on your needed. The first one is engineered wood flooring which perfect for those who initially intend to install the floor by yourself. You know why? Because it was made with thinner surface layer, pre-finished and no need to coming through sanding process when installing the floor in your house. However, this type has its own weakness, which is cannot be refinished several times due to its thinner layer. While the other type is solid wood flooring. This one is much thicker, and can be refinished several times. Much suited if you intend on having another people to work on installing them. Choosing the right type based on the plan on who will install the floors later can pretty much help you out.
2. Installing Preparations
Please make sure that the room where you’ll install the wood flooring won’t have anyone passing by for a while. You also have to remove the door and base shoe molding, prepare the subfloor, and make sure that the room’s temperature is stable at normal level in order to prevent any contraction on hardwood flooring.
3. Determining the Layout
After finished all preparations, it’s time to determine the floor’s layout. You should decide the joists of the floor as well as planning on installing perpendicular to the floor. It’s better to start the installation from the exterior wall first.
4. Fastening Process
Right after the cutting process done by a power saw, you can nail the board to the subfloor. The nailing process can be done manually using finishing nails and hammer or by machine namely power nailing.
5. Placing the Floor’s Row
Now it’s time to place the row of the floor. Try the straight boards for the first three rows, and then cut the starter one for each row. The length can vary, at least 6 inch. You can continue tapping the second, third and later row by fitting the board with the tongue of the first row. You can try to mix and match the length and color from different pack of wood floor that you buy to create a more appealing looks.
