Hardwood Floors Puzzle

[Rossi]

Hello!

Still planning the hardwood floor installation in my house. Already decided on how I will compensate for the floor sagging. Thanks for all the hints.

Now I have another question.

I am installing tongue and groove solid hardwood and the planks are nalied to the subfloor through the tongue side, which means we have to always start from one end of the room and go up to the other end.

The problem is how we start and finish in rooms where the floor goes through doors? For example, one of the bedrooms has a walk-in closet. If start to install the hardwood on the bedroom and then transition to the closet through the door, on one side I will not be able to nail the planks thourgh the groove. That is, the door is in the middle of the room, therefore the floor will "expand" to both sides of the door. How to proceed in this case? I understand we cannot nail the hardwood planks through the grooves.

Thanks much in advance again.

[marson]

Not sure I follow you. You might want to get a book on installing hardwood floors. That said, where you can't nail through the tongues, then you must nail through the face of the board, and putty the hole. This is done all the time next to walls. The other trick in some cases is to use reversing splines to change the direction of the tongues and grooves. This is a narrow strip of wood that you insert into the groove of one row to convert the groove into a tongue.

[Rossi]

Reverse Splines? That should work. Thanks! I'll do a search on these.

The books I got only cover standard installation.

[CWatters]

Glue down the first plank and place heavy weights on it to be sure it's in contact with the sub floor. We used large piles of blocks/bricks over each floor joist. Allow 24 hours or more to dry then secret nail (and glue?) the rest.

The last plank may well have to be trimmed to fit and can be fixed same way as the first.

If you don't want to glue the first and last then nail through the face, punch nails below surface and fill.