This job was way up north in Inverness. The lad had purchased a quantity of oak tongue and groove flooring from someone in Dundee and asked me to collect it, deliver, and fit it.
Although I had done laminate flooring before to quite a high standard this would be quite different because I didn't know for sure what it was to be fixed to, and also the condition of the oak was questionable to say the least. Laminate flooring is manufactued to exacting standards so is always straight and clicks perfectly together for the most part. Not quite the same with old, used oak flooring that's been down for years, and subject to damp, temperature fluctuations, wear and tear etc.
The normal way of fitting hardwood flooring to existing floorboards is to use hidden screws through the tongue at an angle however it turned out that the floor in question was concrete. First thing I did was removed all of the skirting boards, carpets and underlay. After thoroughly cleaning the floor I applied a coat of Thomson's Water seal to prevent moisture from seeping out of the concrete and warping the oak boards. Starting from the longest wall and working across the room I used a special adhesive to fix the boards to the concrete floor. There were a good selection of boards from aprox 8' all the way down to 1' so I made sure to have as many different sizes in each row as possible for a random effect. Setbacks were that some of the boards had warped with age so lots of pushing and shoving to get them lined up. Glueing onto concrete you dont have the luxury of being able to bend a board into shape and fire a screw in, you have to hold it until the glue sets.
Anyway, by the time I reached the opposite wall I had a defecit of two millimetres so have to give myself a pat on the back for that one. The lad said he would send a pic once the furniture was back in and the floor polished but no sign of that yet, but I'll add it when it arrives.
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