Hardwood Floors

We have continued to be busy with projects for the house.  The most recent BIG project that we tackled was putting in our first hardwood floor.  We started with the Master suite for the same reason we painted their first because we wanted to have the room usable as much as possible.  We will also be putting in hardwood floors in the upstairs hallway, my studio, the great room, the kitchen/breakfast room and the dining room.  That's a lot of wood and a lot of work but once we are all done it will be really nice.

We learned a lot this time around and hopefully it will go slightly more quickly and smoothly.  There is a lot of prep work needed to get the floor ready.  The photo above shows the floor with the underlayment laid down.

This photo shows the room with some of the wood laid on the floor.  We chose Brazilian Cherry for our master bedroom and had lots of very heavy boxes of wood to use.  Laying a hard wood floor is sort of like putting a puzzle together.  You don't want all of the short pieces together,  all the light pieces in one area or any thing like that and you need to make sure that your joints from one row aren't too close to the next row or that your joints from the previous row are the same as your upcoming row.

The photo above show the next rows ready to be laid down.  My job was to lay down the up coming rows and to cut the end pieces.  Wayne put it all together and used the big pneumatic nail gun that we had rented.  Between Saturday and Sunday we got most of the flooring down and everything that required the big nail gun.  The last few rows of the bedroom and the closets got done later.  It is funny that the last few rows took longer than the whole rest of the floor.

Besides the beginning and ending rows the closets had some challenges as well.  I guess the good news is that we learned a lot with this floor.  This last weekend Wayne put in the shoe moulding so that we have the floor finished except for adding some quarter round in the closets, possibly getting new air vent covers  and putting in some threshold pieces which Wayne needs the rest of his tools for.

We have the bed and some of the furniture back in the bedroom and I have ordered curtain rods.  There will still be project to do in here the biggest being turning the walk in closets to much more efficient spaces.  I also need to sew the roman shades for the room and we will have some furniture decisions to make once we get the rest of our stuff out of storage but we shouldn't have to take everything out again.

Since we have been so busy with the house and decorating and I am behind with my posts so if you wish to see more photos of what we are up to or what I am doing on my 2010 BJP you can go to my Web Gallery.   If you want to read about my BJP project  you can visit my bjp blog.