Installing the Floor (Do not attempt this at home)

The floor is going in - and watching these guys work, there is no doubt in my mind that having it done professionally was the right call. I mean, we knew that anyway, but I have realize that the gap between what we could do and what needs to be done is not just really huge, but really really huge.

Here you can see the basic process: boards are roughly lined up, then hammered laterally into place with a mallet so the tongue-and-grooves lock. Once the placement is right, they use an angled pneumatic nail gun (it has an attachment that makes it fit the floor perfectly each time) to shoot nails in at an angle through the side to the floor they aren't visible.

The work is done in strips from the front wall. But when they reached the stairs, they attached the first stair-nose and then fit everything against it.

Here you can see a little bit of the stair nose. First they cut the wood and hold it in place to make the joint between the nose and the riser that sits behind it. The riser is then nail-gunned into place. The nose is then coated with glue on the bottom and pressed into place against the riser, and reinforced with more nails.

Our subfloor has noses - they have to cut off the noses of the subfloor so that there is a flat edge to build the riser-nose combination against.

Nala is not very happy about this process, which involves a lot of things moving around (always scary), several new people with work boots (not a plus), and a huge amount of noise. She has been hiding behind my desk in the office, about as far from the chaos as she can get.