Why It Occasionally Sucks to Be Conscientious

How NOT to do the sub-flooring over a
split-line in your house.

When we bought our house, it had an ancient, hideous and thoroughly-abused red/orange carpet in the living room area and weirdly patterned vinyl in the adjoining dining room/kitchen area. I vacuumed for literally hours for the first few weeks with our take-no-prisoners vacuum and it was still seemingly impossible to make the carpet anything that resembled clean.

Accordingly, one of our fairly early projects (once we'd finished all the usual unexpected surprise kinds of things you have to do once you buy a new house) was to rip all of the carpet and vinyl out and put down pre-finished hardwood in the whole of the kitchen, dining room, living room, and hallway. We went with a gorgeous warmly-colored hickory in fairly wide planks that we paired with an equally warm, wheat-colored paint, transforming the space into something we have been proud of and delighted in. Part of the reason for choosing hickory was that it's all but indestructible; you could drive a tank over our floor and it would probably have been fine... a desirable trait in a house that's going to see lots of mud and border collies.

Unfortunately, as time went on, we discovered that we were getting a serious swelling/gap problem. In the winter, the floor shrank and we got a distinct gap between the planks along the center of the house. In the summer, the planks swelled, pushing up in a peak at the some point. Research (and some exploring when we ripped up the flooring the bedrooms to put engineered bamboo down in there) revealed that when our house was put together, the idiots in charge (true to form) didn't use their heads. Instead of laying the sub-floor ACROSS the split line, they laid it out from either side of said line... ugh. Despite doing everything we could without taking the floor up, it eventually became obvious that that floor was going to have to come up and be redone from at least several feet to one side of the split line to the far wall. 

Bridging the gap... how the split line SHOULD look.

Needless to say that was NOT a project we wanted to do. We'd put the floor down with the intention of only having to do it once... aka a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and T-nails. Finally, this year, other things being what they are, Eric decided the floor simply had to get done. We waited until the height of summer when everything was as humid as it was going to get (and it was stupidly humid this year!!), then he took the floor up. (Thank God for brilliant and incredibly organized men, right? His system was incredible!)

Once everything was up, he cut out a chunk of the subfloor and put in a new chunk the way it should have been done in the first place. While he was taking everything out, we decided to open up the pillar in the center of the archway between the living room and dining room/kitchen. It was noticeably out of square, and we were pretty sure it was at least half hollow (and therefore pointless).

Yup. Not only was it half hollow (why?!?), but:
(a) It wasn't a solid pillar. It was a bunch of pieces of lumber bolted together. Technically, it does the job but it seems like more work than just getting to industry-standard single pillar and just using that instead.
(b) They never put a proper bracer under it, so it was resting directly on the subfloor. Not real bright, guys...
(c) The header on one side isn't supporting anything... it's just there, and stops before it reaches the center. Again, structurally it doesn't matter, but it really doesn't make any sense. At all.

On the bright side, with the unnecessary extra removed, the space opened up and we're getting a lot more light now! It will also make it easier to square what remains off so it no longer looks cock-eyed.

One main pillar or a bunch of individual pieces of wood?
This option seems like a lot more work, but what do I know?

When Eric started putting the flooring back down, he discovered that the couple days the stuff that hadn't come up had been allowed to sit, it had shifted a full 1/4 inch! There was that much pressure on everything! As much as it severely sucked, he then had to take up another couple feet of flooring in the kitchen so that when everything was laid back down all the lines would match up down the length of the house. After that, there was some really creative, very talented cutting of thin strips to bridge the narrow space between what had to be relaid and what never came up.




It was a terrible project that Eric did entirely by himself. (All I did was try to keep up on vacuuming and such so that we didn't lay the floor over a permanent bed of sawdust.) I am incredibly grateful to have such a talented and conscientious husband, and very happy to have this project (and all the dread associated with it) off the to-do list!!

As someone who has now done it two different ways (and redone it unwillingly, once), here are my top suggestions for putting down wood flooring in a house:

1. Use engineered wood - bamboo is great! We heard a lot a bad things about bamboo's durability when we were initially making our choices, but we put it down in all the bedrooms and have been extremely impressed and pleased with it's look, feel, function, and durability. (And it's way cheaper than something like hickory!)

More lack of logic and common sense from the morons who
built our house.

2. Always double check the subfloors! If in doubt about anything at all - quality, positioning, whatever - replace it. It won't take that long or cost that much, and it will save you oodles of grief later!!

3. Plank width matters. Shoot for something not too narrow, but also not too wide. (Helpful, I know.) But trust me. Do you homework here, because it will make a much bigger difference than you think to a lot more than just aesthetics.

4. Don't get pre-finished hardwood. They tell you it's easy to clean. It isn't. If you want pre-finished, go with engineered. I don't know why, but it's so much better/easier to maintain.

Anybody else got house projects on the mind before Fall/Winter hit?