Face nailing will have its’ downside. The WHACK! part of operating the regular floor staple driver does two things; it triggers the machine to fire the staple into the floor (duh!), and it snugs the boards together for a nice, tight fit. It’s that tight fit that keeps the floor from looking like it was installed by monkeys.
Part 1: Putting in the mitered hearth frame.
My plan:
1- Plan out in detail how all the pieces will fit together
2- Measure twice
3- Cut once
4- Assemble
What actually happened:
1- Plan out in detail how all the pieces will fit together
2- Measure everything three times.
3- Decide on a very slightly different assembly process
4- Measure everything five times
5- Repeat steps 3 and 4
6- Repeat step 5
7- Finally start cutting wood
8- Assemble everything “dry”: tap pieces in place without sinking nails
9- Realize that the subfloor around the hearth is raised up slightly, just enough that the boards don’t sit flat.
The 45° mitered corners will be especially bad. This will make that zone look like it was installed by, you guessed it, monkeys!
Blow the good half of a day grinding down the subfloor with the belt sander,along with other sanding machines. Fill house with dust. See pictures below. The orbs are back with a vengeance now! (Ref: 9/30 blog entry)
Lesson learned: sanding belts have a finite lifetime. I had 4 or 5 new belts in the garage. Most of these are probably left over from when I sanded the evil “opaque stain” off the back deck. That must have been 7 or 10 years ago. After one minute of sanding, the belts would break at the seam. As it turns out, the glue that holds them together dries out and dies of old age. Off to Lowe’s again. So – don’t keep many sanding belts in your personal abrasive inventory!
10- Assemble everything “dry” again. Note that everything fits together nicely.
11- Sink nails
12- Realize that any of the various assembly plans hatched back in steps 1 through 6 would have probably worked out just fine.
After all that, the mitered frame worked out very good. Here’s a before shot, when I was working on sanding the subfloor into something that could be described as remotely level.
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The important pieces dry-fit together.
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Close-up of the miter zone, with a couple of “fill-in” rows installed.
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Part 2: Finishing up the rest of the room.
Once the hearth was framed out, I just had to fill in to the back wall on each side. Once I was 4 or 5 rows from the wall, the nailer would no longer fit. Swinging the hammer risked thwacking a freshly painted wall (no big deal, really) or busting a window (big deal, really!). And without the whacking of the nailer to snug the boards tightly together, I was left with more caveman-like techniques. I had to improvise with various levers, wedges, and crowbars. Luckily, my friend Rob not only owns his very own personal pneumatic hardwood floor nailer, he has a good collection of finish nailers. That allowed me to:
Pry with one hand, and...
...shoot nails with the other.
Here's an improvised caveman levering system. Note the small piece of wood that is being pried on. This saves the hardwood tongues from being mangled by the crowbar. It was the most useful little trick I came up with!
I tried to be a hot shot carpenter and do some blind nailing thru the tongue with the finish nailer, but that turned out to be kind of tricky, considering I was on working my knees, at a silly angle, prying with one hand, and working the nailer with the other. Seems like 15 or 20% of that row had to be chiseled out (or punched into the subfloor!) so it wouldn’t screw up the next row. Luckily, it was only possible to do that for one row, so I was spared that indignity for the remaining rows. But it all turned out good. And I even cut around the heating duct!
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The very last board was only 3/4” or so wide, so I fired up the table saw and ripped the tongue off the boards for the second-to-the-last row. Then I made some 3/4” wide strips, and nailed in the final row.
Repeat on the other side of the fireplace, and... the wood is down!
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