I shared last week about our frustrating progress of demoing all the floors. You can read that here.

Then it was time to actually start prepping the subfloor for our engineered hardwood flooring. This is one of those projects where (hopefully) it takes a long time to set up but then goes fast once you get started.

In our case, the subfloor was in fine shape, but kind of gross. Meaning, it wasn’t rotten or damaged, but it was…dirty. The builders must have used it as a work surface because there was stain and varnish everywhere.

We started by sanding down any high places to make a nice even surface. We had to use a scraper to get off some of the thickest spills.

Then, we worked on screwing down the subfloor in any place it was loose to help get rid of any squeaks. It helped, but some of the squeaks are from the floor joists, so there’s not much we can do about those.

You can see Wyatt’s instagram video of me checking the floor for squeaks, here.

Then, it was time to lay the felt paper down.  Our flooring and subfloor combo didn’t require a special underlayment, but we added this step after seeing some suggestions online, and after the recommendation of my brother-in-law, Jeremy.

Basically, it’s some extra sound-proofing for the louder wooden floors instead of carpet.

The basic plan was move all the furniture out of the room, cut strips of paper and staple them down. It went pretty fast. You’ll want a nice staple gun to shoot staples into the subfloor. (We already had this on hand, but it’s not an expensive tool to buy.)

We, of course, cut holes for all the vents, etc.

 

We also did this in the hallway and entryway. And pretty soon, we had the rooms all prepped for new flooring. (The hard, fun, awesome, painful part was still to come.) Three cheers for taking up carpet only to put down paper and track dusty footprints all over it for a week!

We spent a lot of time getting our nail gun and air compressor set up perfectly. See all those test nails in this board? Wyatt had to pry this board up multiple times. Not a fun process, let me tell you.

The nails needed to be perfectly centered in the tongue of the board, and needed to go all the way into the board so the next groove could still fit over the tongue easily.

 

We first purchased this one from Harbor Freight.

It worked fine, but the staples it used were just too big for our flooring. (We found that info buried in the instruction sheets that came with the floor, but must have skipped over it the first time we read them. Live and learn right?

So, we returned that nailer and purchased a different one:

Which has worked great. And bonus—it was cheaper!

We also had to get a different air compressor because the little one we had wasn’t rated to do continuous nailing like this project required.

Wyatt’s super excited to have a new, bigger compressor now. It seems to be handling the job just fine.

When it came time to actually start laying down boards, we divided and conquered. I got to work sorting boards by size and checking for any imperfections. Wyatt got to work marking and measuring where the first board would go. He’ll tell you more about that in the post about laying the floors down and stapling them.

 

We used a chalk line to give us a nice, even line to work from. Because trust me, you don’t want crooked floors. 🙂

I’m going to break the blogging rules and tell you we actually are getting close to halfway done with the flooring project but are just now sharing these preparation steps. (There’s a sneak peek in one of the above photos—did you catch it?)

 

Ever laid your own flooring before? We’re a few days into it now and let me tell you, it isn’t for the faint of heart! What tips have you learned? What questions do you have for us about how we’ve tackled this huge job?