Installing Wood Flooring

A lot of people today choose to install wood floors themselves rather than to seek professional help in order to significantly cut down on the expenses. If your home or a particular room is in dire need for a new flooring system, you can still do so without having to pay the exorbitant fees professional contractors usually charge. While this may be a rather daunting task, with a good head on your shoulder and a few pair of willing and able hands, you can definitely pull it off hopefully with little or no scrapes and bruises.

Installing wood flooring can be done in a number of methods such as floating, nail-down, staple-down and the use of glue. Generally, installing wood flooring that is only ¾ thick can be done with the use of nails. For especially thin floors, an adapter is required and the hardwood can be installed by stapling it down on the subfloor, the latter is actually a little easier than using nails. Since you naturally don’t have the tools used for wood flooring installation, it would be highly advisable to rent the pneumatic flooring package that usually costs around $ 50 per day. While this might be yet another expense on your part, most of the hardwood materials such as the Brazilian Teak is very difficult to nail down and you actually run the risk of damaging the wood - a total waste of money you would definitely want to do without. With a pneumatic, you cane easily get precise staples through the tongue without much fuss and preparation.

In order to determine the actual space area you need to cover and the amount of wood you will need, simply measure the length and width of the particular room and multiply it to get the square footages. Make sure you will add 10-15 % allowance for extra boards and the extras to cover for your cutting mistakes. The minimum requirement for the plywood sub floor is three-fourth of an inch. Sweep the floor clean from any debris and dust to prepare it for installing wood flooring.

Since it is basically difficult to go into the details of the highly complex task without the aid of instructional photos that will give you a more detailed and concise examples, you can browse several online sights that actually feature several helpful pictures and step-by-step instruction all throughout the installation process. Most of the do it yourself sites on home improvement are quite helpful in giving construction dummies detailed instruction on installing wood flooring.


The main problem in tackling this particular project yourself is the fact that you are actually run damaging the expensive materials, especially if you don’t even have basic working knowledge on the whole installation process. Just make sure you have enough know how before you will soon find out it is simply way out of your league, incurring more expenses along the way. And while hardwoods are known to be among the best flooring choices in the industry today, there are actually a number of wonderful alternatives that you can choose from that would not nails or glue for installations. Laminates are highly popularly for its glue less innovation that effectively enable even women to install a new flooring system without the need of fancy equipments and much expertise.

This article mainly points out that although a lot of people would opt for hardwood flooring, if it is simply out of the budget to get everything right and the desired time period, then its about time your consider other alternatives. Wood laminates have known to imitate the charm of wood, available with just a fraction of the cost of hardwood alone and you can actually do it yourself.