Kitchen Installation, Part 2: Flooring

With virtually all things Casa, I let Nik lead the way, and figure he'll ask for my help if and when he needs it. We planned to install the kitchen flooring over Thanksgiving weekend, and that Wednesday morning, Nik informed me that he didn't have something called "underlayment." But, not to worry, he'd just go pick some up at Home Depot. I idly asked what the underlayment was. "It's something you need to lay down on the subfloor, to act as a moisture barrier," he told me. "Tesoro Woods recommends a bitumen floor underlayment."

That got my attention. "Bitumen? Like, the nasty stuff they pull out of the Canadian tarsands?"

"Um, yeah."

I then proceeded, in a not very delicate way, to point out that I was NOT going to put our eco-friendly kitchen floor on top of bitumen. But it being the day before Thanksgiving, and Nik already up to his eyeballs in several other tasks, I stepped up to figure out an alternative. We needed something that would include a moisture barrier, and also absorb shock between the floor & the subfloor. Turns out, there's the perfect product: QuietWalk Plus. But trying to locate and purchase a roll on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving was another thing entirely. I called every flooring store in the east bay, and several had QuietWalk - but not QuietWalk Plus. (We are nailing down our floors - so we needed the Plus.)

In the end, I found a distributor that had it in stock -- and a store that would sell it to me. But I'd have to first go to the store, in Richmond, and then drive to Hayward to pick up the roll from the distributor's warehouse. I made it there with 20 minutes to spare before everyone turned into a Thanksgiving gourd. The folks at the supply house were super nice, and I just had to spend a couple of hours in the car.

That, it turns out, was the easy part.

While I prepared Thanksgiving dinner, Nik installed the precious underlayment, and on Friday we got to work laying the flooring.

Installing floors is physically demanding work. Two moderately fit middle-aged people with white collar jobs are not what I'd call your ideal work crew. But luckily I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

To begin, we found a good piece to create the hearth in the doorway to the dining room. We measured and measured to make sure we were square before we got started - once the flooring was down, there was no way it was coming back up.

Then as Nik got started on the first couple of rows, I unloaded the rest of the wood, from the dozen or so boxes, and organized them by size into separate piles.

Then as the floor got closer, I had to continually readjust and move the piles. My other job was deciding the layout for the boards and feed them to Nik. No two are the same color, and they need to have no less than 8" of overlap.

Nik's job was the actual nailing in.

He bought a fancy nail driver that worked with an air compressor - without which, the job would have been much, much harder. But it was still really hard. This was me at the end of the first day - happy and exhausted:

I had a hard time walking the next day. (Note the yoga block - the constant squatting was brutal, but clearly I usually forgot to use it.)

Getting the very last piece in was pretty tricky.

But then it was done!! Soooo satisfying.