In todays webisode, I'll be going through the floor we installed in this room. We got hardwood from
Seneca Hardwoods, which is a cool local company. It's a nice place with good people, they are very tolerant of people wandering in and incessantly changing their mind about things. The store is actually an outlet store, they ship most of their stuff elsewhere for sale, but they're really good to people showing up at their place. Their place is a big empty warehouse with a tiny room in it that acts as the office. When I showed up to pick up the hardwood, I got there at about 10am, which as it turns out, is coffee break time. The guys found me a coffee cup and I hung around in the office for 15 minutes until the office lady came back. We discussed how to unfreeze the truck stalled in the parking lot (it was ~5 that morning) and how clear the birch was they had milled for me the day before. Suffice it to say, I'll be back! So I barely managed to jam 3 bundles and cherry and 7 bundles of yellow birch in the back of the Audi. Barely. For those who don't know, yellow birch is very hard and dense. It's about as dense as beech or white oak, and so lugging 7 bundles (~20 sqft/bundle) of this upstairs almost killed me. We let the wood acclimate for about two weeks up stairs and put it down in a long weekend. I spent about a day removing squeaks by rescrewing the subfloor down, patching holes, vacuuming incessantly, and finally putting down red rosing paper.
I taped up the seams of the rosin paper, primarily to make sure that it would be easy to keep the floor clean as I worked. The plan was to put a cherry border around the room 3 strips (9") wide around the room in a picture frame setup (woven corners) and doing he bulk of the floor with the birch. I started off the next day putting the first piece of cherry along the side of the room I was working from and started around the sides of the room. After a trip to the rental store, I brought back the flooring nailer. I was able to use the nailer on the second piece of flooring, which was far better than hand nailing things. I picked up the nailer around 9am and worked straight for about 12 or 13 hours. You get loopy after 8 or so hours of racking, cutting and nailing flooring.
Here I am just about finishing up. You'll notice it's plenty dark outside. I worked alone until about 2 in the afternoon, and then Julie bailed me out and started racking and cutting boards for me. The picture framed cherry I had oriented so that the tongues were facing the birch, but the flooring we got wasn't end-matched (no groove on the ends). So Julie took over the job of racking the pieces and adding the groove to pieces that abutted the cherry border. I had setup the tenoning jig on the tablesaw to cut the groove, and she ran the table saw all afternoon.
I wouldn't have finished in one day without her helping me with it. It was a ridiculously long day, but I was glad to just get it done. The next morning, I drove back to the rental store, returned the nailer and promptly picked up the floor sander. I was laughed at.
The floor sanded out really nice. I used one of the jitterbug type sanders instead of a drum sander. I think next time I will go for the drum sander. I know it's harder to control and much more aggressive, but the jitterbug takes for ever and all of your money goes into sand paper. The sheets of sandpaper are about 8x for the jitterbug, and so being a cheapskate, I end up using fewer pieces of sandpaper then I should. Either way, I did a fine job of producing massive amounts of dust and the floor sanded up nicely. We swept, vacuumed, swept some more, vacuumed a couple more times, and finally dust mopped with denatured alcohol on rags.
Once this dried, we followed up with a coat of sanding sealer (zinser sealcoat), and then the poly. I wanted to try to match the character of the original hardwood flooring downstairs, and I wanted to make sure the cherry darkened up nicely, so I used oil-based Varathane. I had a really tough time with the mop head applicator for the urethane and quickly abandoned it. I ended up on my hands and knees applying three coats of poly with a 4 inch brush. Thank goodness it was only 160 sqft!
Above is the floor with one coat of poly and below is with three coats on. The first coat was a little crappy, but I got better as went along and the third coat was pretty good. Hopefully it'll hold up well and I won't be repeating the process in 2 years.
Next, I'll show you the trim and the frieze boards I made for over the doors.
I taped up the seams of the rosin paper, primarily to make sure that it would be easy to keep the floor clean as I worked. The plan was to put a cherry border around the room 3 strips (9") wide around the room in a picture frame setup (woven corners) and doing he bulk of the floor with the birch. I started off the next day putting the first piece of cherry along the side of the room I was working from and started around the sides of the room. After a trip to the rental store, I brought back the flooring nailer. I was able to use the nailer on the second piece of flooring, which was far better than hand nailing things. I picked up the nailer around 9am and worked straight for about 12 or 13 hours. You get loopy after 8 or so hours of racking, cutting and nailing flooring.
Here I am just about finishing up. You'll notice it's plenty dark outside. I worked alone until about 2 in the afternoon, and then Julie bailed me out and started racking and cutting boards for me. The picture framed cherry I had oriented so that the tongues were facing the birch, but the flooring we got wasn't end-matched (no groove on the ends). So Julie took over the job of racking the pieces and adding the groove to pieces that abutted the cherry border. I had setup the tenoning jig on the tablesaw to cut the groove, and she ran the table saw all afternoon.
I wouldn't have finished in one day without her helping me with it. It was a ridiculously long day, but I was glad to just get it done. The next morning, I drove back to the rental store, returned the nailer and promptly picked up the floor sander. I was laughed at.
The floor sanded out really nice. I used one of the jitterbug type sanders instead of a drum sander. I think next time I will go for the drum sander. I know it's harder to control and much more aggressive, but the jitterbug takes for ever and all of your money goes into sand paper. The sheets of sandpaper are about 8x for the jitterbug, and so being a cheapskate, I end up using fewer pieces of sandpaper then I should. Either way, I did a fine job of producing massive amounts of dust and the floor sanded up nicely. We swept, vacuumed, swept some more, vacuumed a couple more times, and finally dust mopped with denatured alcohol on rags.
Once this dried, we followed up with a coat of sanding sealer (zinser sealcoat), and then the poly. I wanted to try to match the character of the original hardwood flooring downstairs, and I wanted to make sure the cherry darkened up nicely, so I used oil-based Varathane. I had a really tough time with the mop head applicator for the urethane and quickly abandoned it. I ended up on my hands and knees applying three coats of poly with a 4 inch brush. Thank goodness it was only 160 sqft!
Above is the floor with one coat of poly and below is with three coats on. The first coat was a little crappy, but I got better as went along and the third coat was pretty good. Hopefully it'll hold up well and I won't be repeating the process in 2 years. 
Next, I'll show you the trim and the frieze boards I made for over the doors.
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