"We Have the Tools. And We Have the Talent."

Well, we have the talent. The tools we'll have to rent.

As C alluded to in a previous post, we bought new flooring for the family room!

One of the main projects to renovate the house is now officially underway! The flooring is solid wood, but it's not hardwood. Actually, it's not really wood at all. Technically, it's a grass. It's bamboo. We can't really say that we went with bamboo because it's "ecological" (although I think there are good questions to ask about the chemicals that are used to make bamboo flooring), or that it's price effective (we did find some bamboo flooring that was a lot less than solid hardwood, but not so much with the bamboo flooring we selected). We just really like how it looks. And the fact that it's harder than many real hardwoods is also appealing.

The wood has been sitting in the living room, acclimating to the house climes, waiting for us to assemble the tools and manpower to install it. That time finally came two weekends ago when our friend Miguel came out from NJ to: 1) join us at Lincoln Financial Field to see the Philadelphia Union give Real Madrid a run for the money (Union lost 1-2, but we're the only MLS team to score a goal against and to lose by only one goal to Real Madrid during their summer tour of North America - it's a small "victory" but I'll take it), and:

2) Provide his wealth of knowledge and expertise with installing the flooring. We began Sunday at noon.

We had one issue that needed to be resolved before we could start putting down the new flooring: the edge of the fireplace:

Where the stones of the hearth end, there is a thin lip of cement extending an additional half inch or so:

The edge of the cement lip is much lower than the height of the flooring and it isn't completely straight:

It's not a good edge to start laying flooring against (which is the plan). So to fix this, we framed the hearth and filled in the space between the flooring and the stone with a pre-made cement mix:


The idea is that once the cement sets, we can remove the wood framing and have nice straight edges to start laying the flooring against. Yeah, it didn't work:

When we removed the wood framing, half the cement came with it. We still had the bottom original cement edge of the hearth that was straight enough and we did our best to get a good starting line of flooring planks:

We used 2" flooring nails and a handy-dandy pneumatic nail gun. NICE. Here's what the room looked like once the floor was stripped down to the subfloor before we started installing the flooring:

Once we got that first row of planks installed, the following rows went smoothly:

To finish the spaces on the left and right side of the fireplace, we used a spline to reverse the direction of the boards and had to nail the last two rows by hand using finishing nails - extra big thanks to Miguel for this brilliant idea:

There are no nails showing on the floor. Amazing. Once all the flooring around the fireplace was finished, we went back and filled the space between the flooring and the hearth stones with cement:

I have to say, this came out even better than I originally hoped. So, here's what the room looked like before (when we first moved in):

And here's how it looks with the new floor:

We're really happy with how the floor turned out. We learned a few things about installing bamboo flooring and when we tackle the next flooring project (living room?), hopefully it'll go that much smoother. Next: painting!