Hi all. I'm a complete flooring novice who got was given the option to remove a gym floor for free, so I did - 35 sqm of gym floor lovingly lifted using a generator powered circular saw and a 2.5 tonne trolley jack; to cut out large sections, flip them onto their back before gently knocking the batons off with a sledge hammer - and that turned out to be the easy bit! It's 2 1/2 inch Canadian Maple (Red Deer Brand) T&G in lengths of a foot to seven feet. I'm currently prepping the damn stuff but thought it's be good to get some pointers on, well on everything actually If there's any comments on what I'm doing/planning I'd love to hear them. I'm currently cutting the staples off with some heavy duty cutters (there's a slight raised stub to the cut staple ends but I thought that'd sink into the subfloor) then scraping the crud off the T&G with a flattened chisel then wire brushing the feckers then stacking face to face, back to back so the staple stubs don't leave marks. I'm am about a third of the way through 8-[ Is there a quicker way to do this? It's going to down on a pretty buggered about with pine board floor, which has boards running in different directions between rooms and has an approx 5mm level change between hall, front room, backroom - I'm doing the whole ground floor, the skirts are coming off! So I need to prep the subfloor. I was considering some sort of leveling compound or putting ply down on it - I even considered removing the existing boards completely and putting 3/4 inch ply down but I think that's probably excessive, I could really do with a steer on which methods have what advantages - I thought ply over the top would be prone to squeaks, that leveling compound would be easiest - replacing the boards most complicated/expensive/best? I was then going to use a flooring stapler to fix the flooring, where's a good place to get a second hand one? :-D Obviously it's then need a sand and a varnish but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it Oh, and the aim is to have it done before Christmas :-D So all help gratefully received - HELP!
Best way is to remove boards, then ply onto joists, use a flexible smoothing compound then fully adhering to subfloor using an appropriate wood flooring adhesive don't do shortcuts or you'll regret it in the future.
for the cleats/nails you have sticking out the wood. Use a metal angle grinder to cut them flush to the back of the board. They need to be flush. As the flooring has already been installed by secret nail once then this time you need to fully bond it down.(if you try and nail again you will stand teh chance of cracking the tongue and having poor fixings and squeaks. So for your prep you need 6mm + plywood installed over your floorboards using 'ring shank' nails every 150mm, 100mm at the edges to BS. Personally i would go 100mm centers and 50mm around the edge of each board.
If I understand correctly an adhesive to bond to the boards to the smoothing compound which is bonded to the ply?
Thanks Matt, makes sense about risking splitting the tongue. I was wondering are there any longevity issues with bonding the floor?
Why the compound? just screw down a thicker plywood? Obviously you would need to fix the squeeking floor boards first
What problems would the cleat stubs give you? I'd assumed being harder they's impress into the sub floor - they're only a mm or so at the most proud.
I have used this reclaimed flooring a few times, i usually get it de-nailed, but i think they use a grinder to not break the tongues off! The method i use is to rough off the pine floor with a sanding machine to flatten them out,then check and refix any loose or squeaky boards. Then overlay the pine with good quality 12mm WPB ply by way adhesive and using a compressed air stapler, but make sure the staples arent long enough to come out the bottom of the pine and hit pipes/ cables. You really want to staple every 100mm square to get ample contact with the adhesive. Then to fix the flooring i use a Primatech nailer with the correct length of nails and a 2 part adhesive aswell to get a good squeak free floor! Hope this helps pal
Cheers for the advice Baz - sounds like a belt and braces approach which I like! So I've de-cleated all of the boards and stacked them, that took long enough! I'm now scraping the boards down now with a flattened chisel, then wire brushing them, then flattening staple ends with lump hammer and marking the original staple positions on the tongue with black marker so I can avoid them when re-fitting. Is there a faster way of processing these that anyone knows of? I thought of making a tool to re-cut them but haven't really got the gear to do that.
