How to Install Pre-Finished Hardwood Flooring

Ron's wife Lynn did not like the ceramic tile on her kitchen floor. She wanted to replace the tile with wood, but Ron had some serious reservations due to the kids, dogs and inevitable water spills in the kitchen. Together they found a wood product, Ultra Luster Plus urethane, by Armstrong, which offered a 25-year finish and lifetime structural warranty. Ron was willing to give it a try.

Click Here For a list of what you will need in order to complete this project.

Watch Complete Video Of How to Install Solid, Pre-Finished Hardwood Flooring

1. Remove old flooring
Getting old tile up can be a difficult job depending on how it was put down, and what is underneath. Chipping the floor can be extremely slow going.

If there is a plywood sub-floor, try cutting through the grout lines between the tile with a diamond tip blade designed specifically for cutting through stone and masonry. If you cut the plywood into sections, and get up underneath it, you can pry the floor off in large hunks.

This removal method generates a lot of dust. You should consider wearing a dust mask. You'll also need to seal the room by taping plastic over the doors and place a fan over in the window if possible to pull as much of the dust as possible out. Also, you can attach a vacuum to the saw.

2. Acclimate new floor
The new floor is solid oak. It's almost an exact match for more traditional wood flooring with the main difference being the thickness. This new flooring is only 5/16ths of an inch, compared with 3/4ths of an inch. When remodeling a kitchen, the thinner floor can be an advantage because it doesn't raise the floor up, which will make transitions into the other rooms a lot smoother. It is also helpful when reinstalling appliances that fit under the countertop.

The new flooring needs time to acclimate to its surroundings. That means it should contain the same moisture content as the surface that it is being installed over. To ensure this, bring the new flooring into the room it will be installed it, about 3 or 4 days before installing.

3. Installation
Start by dumping out several boxes of flooring and scramble them together so the grain patterns and colors are intermixed.

It is a good idea to begin the installation along an exterior wall because these walls are usually the straightest. To begin, snap a chalk line about 3 inches from the wall. This will provide a perfectly straight reference for the first row.

Leave a half-inch gap between the floor and the wall to give the flooring room for expansion as the humidity changes.

The flooring can be glued down if you are working on concrete, but if you have a plywood sub floor, you can staple each piece down using a special staple gun, which has a base or a foot that holds the gun at precisely the right angle, about 45 degrees.

The gun drives the staple through at the base of the tongue. It is both the angle of the staple and the staple itself that holds the flooring in place. When you assemble the next row, the groove covers the staple completely so that on the finished floor there are no visible fasteners at all.

Once the first board is in place, continue down the line with each piece engaging into the previous piece.

Measure and cut the flooring to complete the first row and then nail it in place. When beginning each new row, start with a length that will ensure that the seam is at least nine inches from the seam on the adjacent row.

4. Obstacles
Use a combination square to transfer the location of any obstacles onto the board. Then cut out the necessary notch with a jigsaw.

For heating and/or air conditioning vents, mark the location on a piece of flooring and again use the jigsaw to cut out the shape.

While it is possible to cut the wood around the door casings, it would be a lot of extra work and the appearance would not be very good. Instead, use a technique called undercutting.Take a scrap piece of flooring to bring the saw up to the right height, and then actually make a saw cut at the base of the casing.

Roughly cut out the shape of the door casing in the plank. The flooring will then slide underneath the casing and the cut edges will not show.

5. Finishing touches
The final touch is to install strips of quarter round molding around the edges to conceal the expansion gaps.

The new floor was more beautiful than either Ron or Lynn even expected, but better yet, it is extremely tough.