Laying the Floor: Day 1

So... the flooring!  Big job.  Hard job.   

We chose a birch engineered hardwood with a glue-down application.  Sounds easy, right?  The videos you find on YouTube informing you how to glue down engineered hardwood make it appear easy.  It's not.  (But it is doable.  If you find yourself in the position of wanting to do this project, don't worry.  With a positive attitude and a lot of sweat and help from friends... you can totally do it.) 

On to the steps of this process. 

Step 1: Prepare the subfloor.  This basically means getting up the carpet and nail boards, cleaning the concrete, and making sure the floor is reasonably level.  We got all this done a few days ago. 

Step 2: Put these little spacers around the room on all four walls.  These are supposed to maintain the "expansion gap" around the flooring planks as you install them.  They are a nice idea, but sort of a joke. They tip over every time you push the planks up against them.

Step 3: Saw the bottoms off of door frames if they will be in the way of the flooring.

Step 4: Begin applying glue to the concrete slab.  The type of trowel you use is specific to the type of flooring you are installing, so you have to check that beforehand.
 
Step 5: Lay each plank so that the tongue-and-groove edges fit together nicely, using a tapping block and mallet as needed.
 
It sounds so straight-forward, right?  I took this photo in the darkest moments of the project's first hours.  We put the first plank down backwards (oh, and subsequently the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th planks as well) and had to turn it around and re-position it.  Doing this caused copious amounts of glue to ooze up between the planks.
 
I can't tell you how many curse words left my mouth in the relatively short span of time it took to lay this amount of flooring.
 
Thankfully in these types of situations, Daniel tends to brighten his tone in a manner that is inversely proportionate to my darkening outlook and language, and it wasn't long before I took the hint and began to keep my mouth shut if I didn't have anything helpful to say.
 
It was at this point that my MIL arrived with sandwiches and a really positive attitude, and that helped immensely.
 
She also began sorting the planks according to the degree of their bowing (not a good quality in a floor plank), and that was great.

Daniel was the official plank saw master.
 
Before long, we were laying the planks and tapping them in fairly quickly and with no cursing.  We ended day 1 with this much progress.  Not bad, huh?