Flooring Another Bedroom

Inspired by the ease and quickness of flooring Jelly Bean’s bedroom, the weekend before last we continued on and laid the floorboards in the bedroom of our youngest two. Rather exciting as this means all the children’s bedrooms are now sporting floorboards, we only have our bedroom left to floor and we have done the whole house! Although we have also officially run out of the floorboards we salvaged all those years ago from the Convent school and will have to source more boards for our room.

Once PC started us off, Jelly Bean 14 and I kept up a steady pace of laying and nailing, whilst PC measured and cut boards out on the deck and bought them in to us. What to do is now ingrained and we quickly settled into a rhythm; placing down the green strapping for easier sliding of boards, gluing the boards, knocking the tongue and grooves together and finishing with secret nailing.

Working with recycled floorboards means sometimes knocking the tongue and grooves together takes quite the effort. Some can be rather resistant to moving in tight so every so often we’d have to call for PC for a little more muscle although Jelly Bean is incredibly capable of pulling those boards in together.

Progress in the bedrooms moves along so much faster than when we floored the larger living areas, it actually only takes a day to do in laying time, though we spread it over the weekend as life is happening around the project.

Bella 4, is excited about having the floor laid in her bedroom and is keen to help in any way she can. We set her to sweeping up the wood shavings that come off the ‘chocks’ we use to protect the tongues as we bash the floorboards together.

As we come closer to the wall we lose swinging space for the gun’s hammer, it becomes a challenge to swing hard enough, when we don’t the staple can jam up and we have to finish tapping it in by hand.

We complete the room with PC’s new approach, a few boards are pre-hammered together, tongue to groove, glue squeezed onto the floor and with the rubber mallet the boards are forced down into the space.

A little body weight is also used to help to press the boards into their tight space, I might have been called to assist by adding my body weight as well 😉

PC then screws the boards down into place and we leave the boards to dry for several days, before mopping and moving the children back in.

The children are delighted to move back in and take great pleasure in re-organising their rooms. I love to walk on the new boards and I find myself admiring the look often, indeed throughout the whole house.