How it was done
Three days across two floors
Three thousand square feet in three days is only possible if the decisions are made once, at the start, and then followed.
-
Preparation
A floor is only ever as flat and as sound as what is underneath it, so the substrate was prepared before the first plank went down. Anything left uncorrected under a floor telegraphs through it — as a soft spot, a ridge, or a joint that clicks every time somebody walks over it.
-
Layout
Plank direction and the starting line get decided once, and everything in the house follows from them.
On a job this size the decision that matters is how the floor carries through doorways. Run it right and the whole storey reads as one floor. Get it wrong and every doorway needs a strip of trim to hide the argument between two rooms.
Plank run set out across a room -
The cuts
Every vent, threshold and door casing is a cut, and the cuts are where a floor is judged. A long straight run is quick work. The half hour goes on the floor register that has to be framed into the plank, and on the threshold where the new floor has to die cleanly into a door track that is already there and not moving.
A floor register framed into the run -
Both storeys, room to room
Roughly 3,000 square feet across both floors of the house, worked room by room so the family kept somewhere to be while it was going on.
The photographs here are a handful taken during the job rather than a record of every room in it.
-
Finished
Thresholds set, edges closed up, offcuts and packaging out, and a walk of both floors together before it was called done.
