Installing wood floors is fairly complicated, even when you're using pre-finished wood planks. At my handyman business, we install a fair amount of wood flooring but typically the customer has done all the planning, purchased the materials, arranged for delivery of the materials and we simply arrive and handle the installation.
As a homeowner, you can stretch these tasks over several months and never realize how much time went into the project. We had to work quickly and learned how complicated it can get when you look at the steps involved from initial planning to installation.
For this project, our client traveled extensively so we (my handyman business) took responsibility for everything, from planning to getting the materials, installation, cleanup and the finishing touches. Here are the steps we followed:
- Decision to install hardwood floors – our client!
- Preliminary estimates for different types of wood floors – my handyman company researched for the client.
- Picked the Material – our customer, and we did this twice as the preliminary estimate omitted the cost of staining and finishing traditional hardwood.
- Prepared the Floors – my handyman technicians removed the carpet, pad and tack strips. They removed the baseboards (carefully so we can reuse) and doors. Flooring installers have tools to cut wood off the bottom of the door frames as needed.
- Installed the Floors – began with design, i.e. normally flooring runs opposite the floor joists but the installer ran parallel to the joists to make the rooms appear larger (short, 3 ft boards in the hallway would have created a choppy effect.) Extra nailing compensates for this design.
- Reinstalled the baseboard and the doors. They'll caulk and paint unless we have a painter do the entire room.
Almost done? Not quite so fast as we're also doing the stairs. We'll leave that for another post … so come back soon and if you've got some questions, just ask them in the comment section.
Leave a Reply