It's not a retreat, it's an advance to the rear

Well, after my last post, you may have thought that I was pretty well decided that I was going to do exactly whatever I felt like regarding the direction of my wood flooring. I really was. I had convinced myself that I knew better, and even talked to the wood floor guy at Floor & Decor and he said that with thinner engineered flooring the direction isn't quite as important. Somehow, despite all of that, despite my diagrams and my logical arguments and all the rest, I still decided in the end that going across the joists was better. Why? Because I really hate being proven wrong, especially when it's going to cost me weeks of labor and thousands of dollars. If I do the floors perpendicular to the joists, I have every reason to believe that they will last a long time and look great, which would justify the investment. If I do them parallel, they may look great, but they may start to sag and look lame after 5 years. I may not understand how it works and it may never happen. It could be that all my thinking and diagrams are totally accurate.However, I would be taking my own logic above the experience and knowledge of a buttload of people who install wood floors for a living, which is probably not a great idea.

So anyway, that's what happened. Here's how it progressed:

We did the lining up right this time. The way to do it properly is to measure each wall and mark the centers. Then draw lines across the room from each pair of opposing walls, giving you a cross in the middle of the floor. That is the actual center of the room. Because houses are rarely square, you may not have the same measurements. Ours were off by about 1/2" or so. We adjusted the wood at the far end to allow for that, and made sure that the boards lined up perfectly with our center line of the room. Once we got our first row in, it got much easier from there.

As an additional holding measure, we drilled and nailed through the tongue even on the boards we face nailed for the first row. The second row we only drilled and nailed through the tongue, and then we could use the pneumatic nailer.

Here's me tap-tap-tapping everything into place. We got the boards very nice and tight together. I've checked almost every seam in the room and I think there's one where I can fit my thumbnail into it. Everything else is pretty much perfect.

Have to leave this open.

There's the nailer that Erick kindly let us borrow for the project.

This is where we stopped Saturday. The boards on top are the next ones we picked to finish the row. They won't live there forever or anything.

Making progress.

Slowly creeping up on the halfway point...

There is now more floor in the room than not-floor.

I really love the color of this floor. It looks a little more red in the pictures than it does in real life, but it's just so warm and homey.

And here's where we ended on Sunday. We were exhausted and ended before we had to worry about any complicated cuts or anything.

Here are some teasers:

That's what it will look like with the wood floor and the baseboards installed. I think the color of the wood and the walls is really set off perfectly with the bright white woodwork.If all goes according to our worst-case plan, we should have the office 100% done by Wednesday night, including baseboards. We'll see, though. Worst case plans have a way of being underestimated. As we have learned many times, your worst case can always get worse.

So there you have it. We're going to have a few actually complete rooms soon. It's sort of amazing to be getting to this point now. Thanks for reading!