How to: Install an Inexpensive Wood Floor

With basically no budget here's how we matched our new floors to our original floors! Check us out at www.grandmashousediy.com for more information too!

All in this project of 500 square foot of wood flooring cost us less then $300.

During the renovation, when we finally got to putting in our new floors my local lumber yard was completely out of the furring strips I wanted to buy so, after many calls, we ended up buying 1x4s (of the cheapest pine available) somewhere else for $1.80 a board. Not as cheap as I had thought we would get however, it is much higher quality then it would have been had we went with the furring strips. So this floor cost us less then $300 for 500 square feet and that makes me very happy.

You don't need much for this installation but there are some things you can do that we did not do. Squeaks fit right in around here and we wanted no gaps between the boards because the original floor boards had no space between them. To eliminate squeaks and groans you can put down a pad/underlayment between the sub floor and your new wood floor, you can also glue the floor down as well and you can also use some kind of spacer between your boards. These are all things that we chose to skip and all things that would eliminate the squeaking, groaning and shifting. For us having the floors look like they've been here for 100 years was more important to us then living with squeaks.

Question I will undoubtedly be asked: Aren't you supposed to run your new floor the opposite direction the sub floor is run? Yes, that is how you are supposed to do it and no that is not how we did it. In only about 1/4 of the flooring the old sub floor for the screened in porch remained, the rest was plywood so we just went ahead and did wrong. We regret nothing.

We used a brad nailer and two inch long brad nails for this job. Joe nailed the boards down while I cut them with the miter saw outside. He did two brads every few feet in a line down every board so it looks very consistent but you have to look close to see them as brads are very tiny. We bought 12 foot long 1x4s so they spanned the distance of the entire room - 8 foot long 1x4s would have been cheaper and would have made little to no waste but would have created lots of seams and our original wood floors have no seams. This is one of those jobs that one person can do but is so much quicker and easier with two people that you really should have two people.

With me cutting the boards and Joe nailing them down we laid all of the floor in under 3 hours. Other tools we used were a jigsaw and a skill saw for the tedious cuts. We started in the center of the room and worked our way out so either tool was an absolute must because in three instances we had to rip the 14 down lengthwise something that we could not have done that long of a distance with our miter saw and we still do not own a table saw.

We used a pine 18 to cover the uneven threshold between our dining room and our kitchen, I did not want the two floors butting up to each other to be compared as they are very different types of wood as well as slightly different in size. The threshold creates the stopping point that makes the two different woods/floors make a lot more sense to the eye. We sanded the floors together, using a far rougher grit sandpaper (35) on the original floors then we used out here (60). From there I applied one coat of stain to all of it by hand with a paint brush, laid it on there thick, let the floor soak up as much as it wanted and then, after about twenty minutes, wiped up the excess with old t shirts. From there we did two coats of a poly acrylic floor finish with no sanding between coats, letting it be as rough as we could so they would look like they've been here forever. We love them!

Original article and pictures take http://www.hometalk.com/10062631/how-to-install-an-inexpensive-wood-floor site