Wood Floors Over Concrete Slab

Wood Floors Over Concrete Slab

contributed by After I Stepped Out In White

So my sweet puppy Nala...ate a pen. She made this huge stain on our bedroom carpet. It was like the entrance to Hades. It was terrible.

After much threatening of staining our concrete floors, Stuart finally gave in to putting hardwoods in our bedroom. We planned to do hardwoods in our house but not this early and def not in the bedrooms. Oh well...

Thus began the Bedroom project...let me know what you think! We have a few more house projects coming up which I'm excited about but it sure is hard work.

So for a few days, this is what my bedroom looked like. Stuart had ripped up the carpets but saved 2 pieces for us to step on. But still, that concrete looks GROSS and we had tons of wood everywhere because hardwoods have to acclamate to the temperature in the specific room it's going to be in...

Then it was D-Day. All furniture moved out, we started painting the walls a very light gray which i'm currently IN LOVE with.

Stuart started with painting....we chose a light grey to kinda match the grey/teal/brown/tan theme we have going with our curtains and bedspread. Here's a tip when you choose gray. Use a FLAT gray otherwise you'll see streaks from your roller and paintbrush everywhere...and with Gray, you absolutely have to do the "cut ins" (which is what Stuart is doing in this photo), in two coats. We started out with one coat and then rolled the room with 2 coats and the cut ins stuck out like a sore thumb. They dried darker than the walls...so we cut in again and it looked perfect!

You have to lay a tarp! who knew? If you have a slab house, these floors are great but you have to lay something in between the slab and the hardwoods. I finally learned the real purpose of duct tape...=)

See my stool on the end? I was cutting in on my tippy toes while Stuart laid the floors. One thing about these floors is that you just have to keep hammering them in. Sometimes they look like they are sticking out, but as soon as you put the next row in, they will come back down. The trick is to pop in the sides first before popping in the entire row. Does that make sense?

We bought a kit for self-installating people. HOWEVER, the quarter inch spacers they gave us were TERRIBLE. So after much agony and cuss words  prayer, Stuart decided to screw in the spacers to the wall. The other tools like the black thing in Stuart's hand...was supposed to avoid breakage when hammering in the hardwoods...it had about a 98% success rate of not breaking off the tougue and groove parts.

Done! It took us about 1 day to finish it all. Do you like it?