SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to a whole new season of Building Resilience, a show about whole-house solutions for extreme climate, healthy homes, and sustainability.
In today’s episode, we’re going into the basement of a castle that is being renovated to install some durable engineered flooring over a concrete slab.
Everybody loves hardwood flooring, but there is a time when hardwood flooring is the wrong choice. The first step in resilient design is making good choices, and that means picking the right materials for the application. Now, in this case, we have a 120-year-old building. We have concrete floors, and yes, we've replaced them.
We have a capillary break—that's great—but we still have a large expanse, so we need to resist moisture and the expansion and contraction that could take place while still having a beautiful product that does the place justice and can withstand the owner's dogs and numerous guests. This leads us to AHF's Dogwood product, specifically, which has a very durable finish and is also a glue-down product that will resist, frankly, the environment we're putting it in.
The world of engineered wood flooring is vast and complicated, and there's a lot to know. Everything from the top layer—Is it an image? Is it a solid product? How thick is that product? What's the center made out of? Is it a one-layer, two-layer, four-layer, or seven-layer core? Is the bottom cork? Is it MDF? Is it a glue-down?—all of these factors can change what you choose.
Now, in this case, what we chose was a product with a top layer actually made out of densified red oak. Densified wood uses a combination of heat and pressure to increase the hardness by more than double, making this the perfect resilient choice for this house.
Prepare the slab for wood flooring
The first step in the process is flattening out the humps in the floor, which is done with a diamond blade grinder and a big fan.
They lay the floor in sections, since it is such a big basement. Small rooms are done in one shot and the larger rooms are done section by section. The first step is cleaning up the floor of old glue globs, sweeping the dust, and vacuuming up.
Now we can get down to business and spill some glue. They usually spread enough for a couple of courses, so they don't step in in, so it doesn't skin over, and so it stays relatively clean of debris.
The flooring boards are tongue and groove, so when laying new planks, the main consideration is getting the tongue into the groove for a tight fit.
The primary method for tightening the fit is to whack it with a mallet.
As with any other piece of wood, for the last piece, you can measure or scribe, and scribing is always faster and more accurate.
One thing you can see in this shot is that the flooring does not necessarily want to sit in the glue, which is why later you’ll see them weigh down the flooring after they finish a section.
And this section of flooring butts into the brick wall whereas other sections slip into undercuts in the wall like this.
The undercut allows a little wiggle room for fitting while still achieving a really great finished look, but it doesn’t remove all complications.
General wood flooring installation
Before digging into the complications, let’s look at the easy stuff.
Begin with a room without flooring, and pick a wall to work from. Sometimes it is the longest wall, sometimes it is a transitional wall, in this case, it is the back wall, and we are working toward the complications.
Snap a line to install that first course to and spread enough glue for the first course.
That first piece should be off the wall about ½ inch to allow for movement, and this gap will be covered with shoe molding later.
The ends of the planks have a tongue and groove just like the edge, so slip that second piece in and tap it down into the glue.
Cut the last piece to fit, again, leaving a gap at the wall.
Now you can spread enough glue to underlay a few more courses. Stagger the joints at least 4 or 5 inches and try not to repeat the pattern in successive courses, leave a few courses between similar joints.
Now do the same thing over and keep doing it until you run out of room.
At the other end of the room is an exposed brick wall, so, no baseboard and no shoe molding. This brick has been undercut so the flooring can tuck under.
Because we can’t slip a piece with two notches into an undercut, we’ll need to fit the flooring in two pieces.
The first piece is cut to fit and angled into place.
As is the second one.
Fitting notched flooring into an undercut brick wall
The end of the run brings us back to the real world, where Shawn and Parker are cutting a tapered plank--because the brick masons from 150 years ago didn’t anticipate Shawn and Parker would be installing a wood floor here in 2024.
Before spreading any glue, though, they test the fit, of course.
When they know the taper will slip in, Parker spreads glue, they lay the first plank, slide the tapered plank into place and whack it with their mallets.
They place a joint in the middle of the taper, because obviously, they cannot install the run in one piece. On the other side of the brick column, you can see how they hold the plank up out of the glue as much as possible while whacking it in place.
Back in the round nook, Parker illustrates how to get a pretty clean edge without an undercut. Scribe each edge of the board and sketch in the curve. This nook will receive wooden paneling detail, so the edge doesn’t have to be perfect, because it will be covered. However, Parker takes pride in his workmanship, so he aims for near perfection while working at a reasonable pace.
Scvribing wood flooring to meet a rough brick surface
Going back to the undercut areas. The cut is made with an undercut saw using a diamond blade which gives wiggle room for the fit. He checks to make sure the flooring will fit underneath, and then cuts it again when he sees that he missed it by “that much.”
Unfortunately, because the blade is circular, it cannot cut into the corners, so there is some careful scribing that needs to take place. This will be the finished cut, so it needs to be perfect. Fortunately, engineered flooring will not shrink and swell with the seasons, so a tight fit should stay that way.
Scribing this piece is no different from scribing any piece of finished trim. You inch your way up to perfection, one itty bitty trim at a time.
Begin by setting the workpiece in place and adjusting the scribe to the distance it sits from it’s final destination, which is about a quarter of an inch. By running the scribe along the face of the brick, the resulting line ought to be pretty close to exactly what it should be.
Of course, the cutting may not be exact; so he will need to fine tune the fit. As he zeroes in on it, he just runs the pencil along the brick portion that the flooring must fit to. The fine tunning is usually done with a belt sander, rasp, or file to slowly creep up to the prefect fit.
Tape the joints together and weigh down the flooring
As promised, we are going to close this out by securing the flooring place so it will look as good tomorrow as it does today. That involves pushing against the edge and using the old tape clamp across the joints.
Now that the joints are taped tightly, the guys weigh down the flooring with adhesive buckets and boxes of flooring. Next, they will cover it with a protective layer and move on to the next room, like they did here.
www.protradecraft.com | SUBSCRIBE, please! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-w8-a4UPNynP8v8A4Jlz1w?sub_confirmation=1 Welcome to a whole new season of Building Resilience, a show about whole-house solutions for extreme climate, healthy homes, and sustainability. In today’s episode, we’re going into the basement of a castle that is being renovated to install some durable engineered flooring over a concrete slab. The first step in the process is flattening out the humps in the floor, which is done with a diamond blade grinder and a big fan. They lay the floor in sections, since it is such a big basement. Small rooms are done in one shot and the larger rooms are done section by section. The first step is cleaning up the floor of old glue globs, sweeping the dust, and vacuuming up. Now we can get down to business and spill some glue. They usually spread enough for a couple of courses, so they don't step in in, so it doesn't skin over, and so it stays relatively clean of debris. The flooring boards are tongue and groove, so when laying new planks, the main consideration is getting the tongue into the groove for a tight fit. The primary method for tightening the fit is to whack it with a mallet. As with any other piece of wood, for the last piece, you can measure or scribe, and scribing is always faster and more accurate. One thing you can see in this shot is that the flooring does not necessarily want to sit in the glue, which is why later you’ll see them weigh down the flooring after they finish a section. And this section of flooring butts into the brick wall whereas other sections slip into undercuts in the wall like this. The undercut allows a little wiggle room for fitting while still achieving a really great finished look, but it doesn’t remove all complications. Instagram: www.instagram.com/protradecraft Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/protradecraft Twitter: @TradeCraftsman | twitter.com/tradecraftsman Pinterest: @ProTradeCraft | pinterest.com/ProTradeCraft Subscribe to ProTradeCraft's YouTube channel for regular updates