Hi all,
I fitted our oak living room floor today. Very pleased with the result (not as smooth as laminate, but hey, you can't have everything ;-)
I have one outstanding question. The boards were end-matched T&G, laid onto battens fixed to the subfloor. I hired a 45degree secret nailer for the job. This worked very well, and did a great job of getting the nails in.
For the first two rows of boards, there wasn't enough clearance to the wall to allow me to use the nailer, so I hand nailed at 45 degrees, then punched in.
I then proceeded to lay all the middle rows with no problems. But when I came to doing the last two rows, I found myself in an interesting situation. There wasn't enough room to use the nailer, and there wasn't a great deal of room to hand nail either. I got a few nails in, but made use of a few blobs of nonails as well.
For the last row, there really wasn't enough room to do any nailing. So it was either face nail, face screw or glue. I glued. I thought about using face screws on the edge of the board, to be covered by skirting, but the gap required for fitting the last row meant that the skirting would need to be 25mm deep to hide any nails/screws used.
My question is this - is there a recommended way of handling the last one/two rows of a T&G floor? How did you do it?
TIA