Flooring The Last Room! Our Room

Early September we finished flooring the last of the children’s bedrooms which finished off our supply of salvaged floorboards from the Convent school. We still needed flooring for our bedroom so we followed leads for new boards, one being the purchase of second hand boards from a local demolition company, but at $3.50/lineal metre this translated to $850 for one room!

PC is an accountant at a local plywood company and we began considering the option of plywood floorboards. I admit I held some biased beliefs against ply, I might have called it ‘fake timber’ and so needed to become more flexible and knowledgeable in my thinking 😉  PC’s work had a couple of options available in the quantity we needed and we settled on an old pack of out of spec darker blackbutt. One board of the ply is the width of one and a half of the Yellow Box and the colouring is lighter than Yellow Box, though once the Yellow Box is sanded it won’t be so different, happy with our choice.

We were rather keen to finish flooring the whole house as the ‘end was in sight’, so we pressed on and floored our bedroom last weekend.  We began in our walk in wardrobe which was a little fiddlier than our bedroom, but a good place to start as this was a new method of flooring to learn.

The green strapping wasn’t strictly needed, we didn’t need the straps for ease of board movement as we did for the second hand floorboards, but as the yellow box is 19mm thick and the ply only 14mm the strapping gave the boards a little ‘height’ to meet more evenly in the hallway.

Also the straps helped the glue to stay thicker and not compress too flat.

The plyboards were a dream to work with, placing a chock for protection at the back we simply knocked the tongues into the grooves in front. No repeated hammering needed as with the second hand boards, no secret nailing, just a couple of hits and they were in, even Bella (4) was able to work the boards.

A couple of hits at the end of the boards to move them in tight to the wall and to each other, and done.

Jack Jack (12) along with Bella were our offsiders for this room and they really were amazed at how easy it was knock the boards into place.

Once we were in the rhythm it was really surprising how quickly it took to lay the entire floor.

Before we knew it we’d reached the other side and were done 🙂

Quick explanation, the door to the left is our walk in robe, the space to the right is our ensuite, and the main door opens into the hallway. That’s the old boards in the hallway still to be sanded to lighten them up.

Pleased with how it looks 🙂 Can’t wait to move back in, though we’ve decided we’ll sand and roll on the poly-urethane before we move back in, so patiently waiting…