Floating floor installation Day 2, more pain and suffering but we're getting there.

Today I completed about 60% of the sitting room floor before lunch while Tina prepared the family room for installation; removing all plaster lumps, vacuuming and underlay. We then started on the family room after lunch.

Before: Family room cleared of all furniture (of course), slab as clean as possible. If you look closely out the window, you can just see the head of Mr Meyer, our lemon tree - despite our poor track record of keeping plants alive, Mr Meyer seems to be thriving even in the constant rain we've had the last few days.


Next picture, about halfway done with the family room. The complicated thing here is that we started the entry and hallway before the family room, and we want the boards to line up. This involved lots of measuring and calculating, and allow 15.9cm of space before laying the first full board in the family room. Once the boards here meet up with the hallway boards, I'll go back and trim a line of boards to fit against the wall.


Essential tools for floating floor installation: Hammer, pull bar, rubber mallet, tapping block, spacer blocks, pencil, ruler, measuring tape, a bigger hammer when you realise you should've spent more than $3.99 on the first hammer which weighs as much as a banana and is about as effective. Plus a few bandaids for those scraped knuckles, and lots of swearing when you accidently bang your rubber mallet against the wall and it leaves a big black scar that you'll have to come and patch/repaint later. Or just pay someone else to deal with the pain and suffering of installing a floor. But I figure we've come this far, we might as well push on until it's all done - it's like watching a bad movie, thinking you should walk out but there's only 20 more minutes to go.

Finally, the end result, family room pretty much all done, but where it extends into the hallway at the bottom of the picture not yet done.


Pretty happy with how things are going so far, but the complicated part really starts tomorrow where I have to make sure the family room floorboards are perfectly parallel with the hallway flooring. Plus doing the study with the double cavity doors - I think I'll have to put a 3mm expansion gap filled with cork, caulk or an expansion joint, depending on how closely we can cut and lay the flooring.

I've also discovered a little dip in the floor, right near the entrance door - d'oh! I think I'll put a potplant or something over it to stop visitors walking on it and noticing the defect. High tech solution, right?

T&T