I decided to put an solid rustic oak floor into my kitchen, basically because I found a source of solid 19mm oak tongue and groove going cheap. I've never done any flooring before so it was a bit of an experiment to be honest...
Here's a couple of tips that others might find helpful.
1) Hire a proper flooring nailer, it will save you loads of time, but practice on a couple of offcuts to make sure that you've got your technique right.
2) Sometimes the nailer might jump and not drive the head of the nail underneath the surface of the wood, I found it a real pain to try and drive the nail into the wood with a punch, and it was easer to grind off the rest of the protuding head with an angle grinder.
3) I used rustic grade wood with quite a few knots in it. Some look great, but others don't. You can cut up long planks into two pieces and take out the knot, then recreate the tongue and groove using a router, or tablesaw.
4) Get the biggest profile gauge you can, even this might not give you a full profile of a door.
5) Cutting profiles in 19mm solid oak is pretty difficult with a jigsaw, and can take hours to get even remotely close, you also have the danger of wood splitting...try and get hold of a small table bandsaw if you have a lot of profiles to do, it'll be much much easier. I didn't bother taking off the skirting board when I did mine.
6) If you have long planks, sometimes there might be a slight warp, once again it might be better to cut into two shorter ones and recut the tongue and groove for a really tight finish. Check the line of the plank against a laminate worktop you know is straight if possible.
7) I used a 48" sash clamp to help tightly clamp the wood where possible, very useful as I did the floor with no help. If you are too far away from somewhere to clamp to, use wedges, with one wedge screwed into the floor to help clamp the wood together.
I stress that all this advice is from a complete novice with one floor under his belt, if anybody has any comments or better ways of doing things I'd love to hear them... I'll post some pics shortly...
Thx
Here's a couple of tips that others might find helpful.
1) Hire a proper flooring nailer, it will save you loads of time, but practice on a couple of offcuts to make sure that you've got your technique right.
2) Sometimes the nailer might jump and not drive the head of the nail underneath the surface of the wood, I found it a real pain to try and drive the nail into the wood with a punch, and it was easer to grind off the rest of the protuding head with an angle grinder.
3) I used rustic grade wood with quite a few knots in it. Some look great, but others don't. You can cut up long planks into two pieces and take out the knot, then recreate the tongue and groove using a router, or tablesaw.
4) Get the biggest profile gauge you can, even this might not give you a full profile of a door.
5) Cutting profiles in 19mm solid oak is pretty difficult with a jigsaw, and can take hours to get even remotely close, you also have the danger of wood splitting...try and get hold of a small table bandsaw if you have a lot of profiles to do, it'll be much much easier. I didn't bother taking off the skirting board when I did mine.
6) If you have long planks, sometimes there might be a slight warp, once again it might be better to cut into two shorter ones and recut the tongue and groove for a really tight finish. Check the line of the plank against a laminate worktop you know is straight if possible.
7) I used a 48" sash clamp to help tightly clamp the wood where possible, very useful as I did the floor with no help. If you are too far away from somewhere to clamp to, use wedges, with one wedge screwed into the floor to help clamp the wood together.
I stress that all this advice is from a complete novice with one floor under his belt, if anybody has any comments or better ways of doing things I'd love to hear them... I'll post some pics shortly...
Thx
