I realize that the site has been quiet for a while. I have been quite busy with numerous projects, including the...
The Bamboo Flooring Project
For Jessawick's birthday, we decided to lay a new floor in the office. It had the same carpet since we bought the house, and it was getting a bit
worn. And by
worn, I mean
foul.
We both love bamboo, so that's the way we went. We found a beautiful natural bamboo flooring at the local flooring place.
Demolition was the first (and worst) part of the job. Jessawick ripped up a lot of the carpet during the day while I was at work. After the carpet (and pad) were removed, we needed to remove all the tack strips and staples from the floor below.

As you can see, the carpet was placed over the existing hardwood floor. The hardwood itself was in pretty bad shape. We had to pull lots of staples out and clean it up before we could start laying the new flooring.

On a side note: Dyson vacuums are amazing. We have the "yellow" model. I think it's exceptional. It pulls stuff out of a rug that will terrify you. Much more effective than anything else we've owned. We used it extensively in cleaning up the floor.
I decided it was in our best interest to rent a pneumatic nailer for the job. I had never run a flooring nailer before, so it was a new experience. For those of you that have never had the pleasure, a flooring nailer is a special air-powered nail "shooter" that holds the floor in place as it fires a nail into "just the right spot". The rule. I highly recommend them.
At this point, we had a room that was ready to go. Our checklist:
- Clean room
- Moldings removed
- Lots of bamboo flooring
- Hammers, nails, etc.
- Tapping block (for beating the floor into place without damaging it)
- Big rubber mallet (for tapping block and air hammer)
- Flooring spacers
- Pneumatic floor nailer (and nails)
- Air compressor
- Table saw (with 60+ tooth finishing blade, important!)
As with any project, the exceptions took most of the time. The regular sections of the floor were very quick. We spent most of our time making the custom fits in the closet and around the doors. The nailer was great. Words of warning: you can only use a nailer on the center of the room, you must do the first two and last two rows by hand (the nailer won't fit).
Here's the room at about 60%. We moved the saw back onto the completed section to make room. We kept the vacuum handy to keep the dust down. In retrospect, I was much happier wearing the dust mask than not.

We ended up needing to work on it Sunday as well. It's not that it took all that long, but we weren't really prepared, so we didn't work quickly on the first day. We ended up needing to buy more materials because we didn't include the closet in the original specification. Oops.

The floor ended up looking really nice. This wasn't the end of the project though. We ended up painting next. After that, we installed nice fresh moldings throughout the whole place.
Our frog was not pleased when we transported the molding home from Depot. He was rather
smushed. That's a technical term.