Is hardwood floor supposed to elicit involuntary moaning?

Because it does. Every time I walk up my stairs and see all the glorious flooring installed, my heart just goes pitter-pat. I can't help it. You probably haven't lived in a house with mostly bare subfloor before. You're probably not a godless heathen savage with a bone in your nose, and those are the people who don't have floors. Bad people. Maybe cannibals. And I was living like them for over a year. No flooring in pretty much my entire upstairs area. I was like Jane Goodall. I wasn't completely feral, but I was neighbors with feral.

But now, everything is shiny and new. I'll show you.

We finished the master bedroom and then moved into the closet. Let me tell you, my dad and I are getting pretty brilliant with working around doorways. We've got some downright gorgeous transitions going. You know, now that we're done and will never have to do them again.

You can see that we exchanged our old "drill, then hammer a nail in, then set it with a nail set" approach for the newer, sleeker, faster "pneumatic finish nailer" method. That saved us so much time, you don't even know.

Ta da! All done in there. Now for the hallway.

The little linen closet to the left was going to cause us problems, because our starting line was along the wall that's at the top left. So we had to start there to get our straight baseline, then work backwards into the closet. That ended up being a relatively minor problem, overall.

It just involves a lot of face nailing (not as painful as it sounds) and a lot of subsequent countersinking and hole filling (not as fun as it sounds).

There we go. Finished closet floor. Now, on to the rest of the hallway.

We just had to work our way down, much like we usually do in the rooms, except the narrower sections meant there was a larger ratio of face-nailed rows to tongue-nailed rows in the hallway. It's kinda sucky, but i don't know a good way around it, unfortunately. We tried nailing through the tongues of the boards with the finish nailer, but just weren't able to get consistent results.

We turned the corner, and this bit was next.

It actually didn't take all that long to do, though. That's the nice thing about spaces that run perpendicular to the boards. A lot more tongue-nailing makes everything go faster, both immediately and in the cleanup stage.

Now that's finished...

And that's finished! The bottom left section that doesn't have a board in it is intentionally left blank. We aren't yet sure about what we want to do with our stairs, so we're remaining undecided for now, and leaving our options open. But that's a whole lot of wood floor in there now. And it looks great, and it feels great. It looks like a real, actual house. Once we get baseboards on it, that's just going to blow my tiny mind.

Also, figured I'd show a picture of the new bath rugs my mom got for us. They're very nice, and bring the gray color into the mix. The master suite is going to be all color coordinated, because we're super awesome.


That's all for now, folks. Thanks for reading!