Hardwood Installed After the Wood Has Settled In

Wood is still moving after it leaves the mill. It gives up moisture in dry air and takes it back in damp air, and it does that across the width of the board rather than along its length. That is why the delivery date matters as much as the install date. Boards come into the actual room, get freed from the bundles so air reaches every face, and sit there with the heat or the air conditioning running the way it normally runs. Days, not hours. What we are waiting for is the wood and the subfloor to land close to the same moisture content, and we read both with a meter instead of guessing from the weather. A floor laid straight off the truck in January will be tight in July. One laid during a humid August stretch opens into a row of gaps the first week the furnace runs.

The subfloor is the other half of it. We walk the room with a straightedge and mark the humps and dips, because flat matters more to a wood floor than level does, and an old plank subfloor in a two family is rarely either. High spots get sanded or planed down, low spots get shimmed or filled, and loose sheathing gets screwed to the joist so the squeak comes out before anything covers it. Then there is the perimeter. Wood needs somewhere to expand, so a gap runs around every wall, under the baseboard or the shoe, sized to the width of the room and the species going down. Skip it and the floor has nowhere to go in a wet August, so it lifts in the middle or buckles along a wall. The gap is invisible when the trim goes back. It is also the cheapest insurance on the job.

What the visit covers

• Deliver the wood early and let it open up in the room
• Meter the boards and the subfloor until the readings agree
• Straightedge the floor and mark every hump and low spot
• Plane the high spots and shim or patch the low ones
• Screw loose subfloor down to the joists to kill the squeak
• Roll out the underlayment or vapor retarder the job calls for
• Nail down, glue down or float it based on what is underneath
• Leave an expansion gap at every wall and every fixed object
• Rack the boards for length and grain before fastening a row
• Fit stair nosing, thresholds and transitions to each doorway

Matching into a floor that already exists

Plenty of the work here is not a whole house. It is a back bedroom, a hallway, or a kitchen that lost its floor to a leak, and the new wood has to meet boards that were laid generations ago. Width, thickness, species and grain all have to line up first, and old strip oak was often milled thinner and narrower than the stock sold today. We measure the existing board before ordering anything. Where new meets old, the boards get woven in with staggered joints instead of butted into one straight seam across the doorway, so the change is broken up rather than drawn as a line. Then the whole area gets sanded and finished as one floor. That is the part people skip, and it is the reason a repair either disappears or announces itself every time the light comes through the window.

How the floor attaches depends on what it is going over. Solid strip over a wood subfloor gets blind nailed or stapled through the tongue at a set spacing, and that is still the strongest way to hold a floor on a framed deck. Engineered plank over a concrete slab in a mill loft or a finished basement gets glued down or floated, because you cannot drive a cleat into concrete and slabs give off moisture that solid wood will not tolerate. Floating means the floor rests on the underlayment and holds itself together, which suits a slab but sounds different underfoot and needs a moisture barrier under it. Stairs are their own trade inside the trade: treads, risers, a nosing that overhangs correctly and a tight return on the open side. We price stairs separately because the hours have nothing to do with square footage.