Installing Hardwood Flooring
This section is designed to answer the following:
- How to prepare your room for flooring installation?
- What is required as a subfloor?
- Does it need to be equalized in the home prior to install?
- Does it matter what width of flooring I buy?
- Are there special issues associated with a new house?
NOTE: This is not meant to replace a professional installer,
but rather to help our customers understand the process and
offer some guidance to those that wish to install the flooring
themselves.
Step 1. Preparing The Job Site for a Wood
Floor
What subfloor is considered adequate?
The National Hardwood Flooring Association recommends that
all 3/4" flooring be nailed down onto a minimum of 5/8" tongue
and groove plywood. Alternate sheet products like Aspenite
are not considered to be suitable substitute.
Should I do anything to the subfloor before
I install my MIRAGE flooring?
It is essential that the subfloor be screwed down every
6-8" to the underlying floor joists. It's a good idea to jump
around on every corner of the floor, to locate any remaining
squeaks. Add additional screws and where necessary reblock
the floor from underneath in any areas that persist in being
noisy. Don't let anyone convince you that squeaking can be
solved by nailing down your flooring. At that point, it is
usually too late!
I'm installing this flooring in a new house,
are there any special issues here?
New houses are notorious for very high humidity. You have
cement foundations drying, new paint and drywall, all adding
moisture into the new home's environment. It is a great idea
to spend ten dollars and buy a humidistat to measure the relative
humidity in your home.
You should not bring into the home or even think of installing
a new wood floor in Northern Ontario until the humidity is
below 55%. If installed under excessively high humidity it
will instantly swell and compress the edges of the wood flooring.
During the first dry winter these same boards will show significant
cracks as they react to a much dryer environment.
Do I need to lay down paper under the
wood floor?
This is commonly referred to as a vapor retarder. If your
flooring is being laid over a damp basement or crawl space
or in any situation where you are concerned about moisture
coming from underneath the floor, it is well advised to lay
15 lb felt paper underneath the wood floor, but remember this
is not a perfect solution for preventing water penetration.
(maybe rethink using wood floor at all, in situations of high
moisture)
If on the other hand you are laying floor on a main level,
where often basement humidity is not an issue, using felt
paper is not necessary.
It is quite common to hear that we should install felt paper
to stop squeaks--- Felt Paper does
not stop squeaks --- usually squeaks are caused by
subfloor movement against floor joists or floor board movement
between boards, when not enough nails have been used during
installation. Felt paper will not help either of these conditions.
Do I need to bring the flooring into
my house ahead of time?
NO! At Lacasse Fine Wood Products, and at the MIRAGE factory
all the flooring is kept in a humidity controlled environment.
"Equalizing" a floor, would be only necessary if the flooring
was not at the correct moisture content to start off with.......
and then I would be very nervous to deal in the product.
To put it into context, we dry lumber here, from logs, every
day. On average, it takes 45 days in a forced environment
with heat and very large industrial fans, to encourage oak
to give up the moisture that naturally exists in it's cells.
What good do you think it would do to your floor to let it
sit in your home for three days packaged up in boxes stacked
up on top of each other.
As best case scenario it would only change the moisture
content of the top few pieces, leaving the rest of the wood
as it was. Flooring must be made to the correct moisture
content-- at the time of manufacturing -- to lay a consistent,
uniformly moving floor.
Exceptions may occur in other areas
of the country where the environment is consistently
overly dry or overly humid.
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