Sometimes you just have to start over to obtain the beautiful floor that you desire. We had to do that with a project located in south Tacoma. The homeowners were done with the carpet and wanted to replace it with a hardwood floor.
We removed the carpet which revealed a shorts floor made up of red and white oak. A shorts floor is one made up of pieces no longer than 18″. Now usually we would just refinish a floor like this but it had a few issues: the first being the floor was not flat it contained some dips and rolls. Back in the day shorts floors were nailed down with just one nail per board which makes them loose over time. And the floor was not the look the owners wanted, they wanted a plank floor.
Our client chose a 5″ select grade White Oak floor with a slight grey stain, which we call Rustic Beige. First thing that we had to do was to remove the carpet and the oak flooring. Then proceed with getting the subfloor in prepared for a new floor. The decking subfloor was not sound or flat. We had to go through and rink shank nail the loose deck boards then we determined that we had to add a layer of plywood over the top to level the floor before we added the hardwood. Since the floor had a lot of highs and lows we shot a laser around the room and shimmed up the areas that needed it to make the plywood flat and level throughout the space.
Once that was completed we installed the new plywood and applied a moisture retarder to help slow any moisture coming up from underneath so that it won’t negatively affect the new floor.
We then were ready to install the new White Oak flooring. Being a 5″ wide product we both glued and nailed the floor down making it solid and it will be there for potentially centuries. We proceeded to sand, stain and finished the floor with a commercial grade waterbased so that they shouldn’t have to refinish the floors for many years to come.
