Ready to finish floors

Jeremy setting nails last week

We've been busy preparing for the floor finishing crew that arrives tomorrow morning to sand and then polyurethane the pine floors we put down last week. The most time intensive aspect of getting ready has been setting the nails. It's just a lot of work and the kicker is that when the finishing guys showed up this morning to drop off some equipment they said we had to set them deeper then I thought we would, so we had to go back over it all this afternoon. Luckily for me Randy showed up to help out and made a long hard job manageable.

Otherwise, we are ready. I'll be back to working on the kitchen cabinets this week as access through the house will be pretty limited until the floors are done, which should be Thursday sometime. This means Nancy and I'll be living in the yurt again for the week.

Floors down

The pine floors installed. Notice also the woodstove is now set on the slate hearth. We'll get around to hooking it up soon. Oh yes, we also built a somewhat more expansive bottom step spilling out into the living space

Adam hard at work

The floor in process

Jake's tile work grouted and nearly done

Adam has been back up to help us out for the last two days and he and I managed to get the flooring down on the first floor. Due to some supply issues we went with 2" nails on the first floor instead of the 2 1/2" nails that Nancy and I used on the second floor. It was striking (no pun intended) how much easier the smaller nails were to nail in. Also, in a blessing from on high, the span of the main area of the living space on the first floor turns out to be just under sixteen feet wide and this allowed us to install our large stack of sixteen foot pine planking with no joints whatsoever on the first floor. I wish I could say I planned it, but I didn't -- it just worked out that way.

The next job for me is to set all the nails on both floors, which means hammering them with a tool called a nail set that submerges the nail heads roughly an eighth-inch below the finished the surface. This will make things good for next week when the floor sanding/finishing crew arrives to polish off the job.

Working alongside Adam and me today was Jake who is nearly done with the bathroom tiling project. The last remaining detail is to caulk the corner joints and then we are free to hook up the all the fixtures and call it a working bathroom. Maybe that'll happen this weekend?

Square Cut Nails

We are putting our pine floors down with square cut nails, which if you were to see them would probably look like what you think of as "old fashioned" nails. Cut nails were most commonly used from the seventeen-hundreds up through the early twentieth-century, and are made by shearing a small wedge from steel plate. This results in a nail that is parallel on two sides, and tapered on the other two. A head is then formed on the sheared nail and it is ready for use.

We're putting down wide plank pine floors and cut nails work well because there is a lot of width across each board to attach to the sub floor and using three cut nails each gives it a lot of hold. In the old days, this is how a floor would go down and you'd have the nail heads showing as a part of the process. We're pretty happy with the results.

More floor

This is a really cool wedge system to push the flooring planks together as you are installing them to achieve a tight fit

Nancy and I spent a long day yesterday and made a lot of progress on the second floor. We've calculated that it takes, on average, about an hour per course of flooring to put down. This includes rearranging, making special cuts, backing up when necessary, etc... We figure we're about two-thirds of the way done on the second floor and expect to finish it this weekend.

At the end of the day we each took a bath and then nodded off just after midnight.

Happy New Years!

Pine Floors, Cut Nails

This shows the trim around the perimeter of the stair opening. (The big white patch is where I had to go into the finished wall to do a little plumbing alteration a few weeks back)

Putting our second course of boards down

Rosin paper goes down first

Most of my day was spent trimming out around the stair opening in order to be ready to put down the pine floor. At roughly 7:00 this evening we actually commenced floor installation. Our floors are twelve-inch wide Vermont pine boards affixed with square-cut nails. (I'll explain what square-cut nails are sometime in the near future). Having never installed a floor with cut-nails it was immediately apparent that all that nailing is both hard and takes time. Nonetheless, we're happy to finally be making some progress in this department and are going to make a full day of it tomorrow.

If you notice two people walking around town with Popeye muscles in their right arms after we're done installing this floor it's because of all the nailing we've just taken on.