Usually,
in home design and
interior decorating, we have to make a lot of compromises. We either
get the
comfortable couch, or the environment friendly one.
We can get the more
expensive but better looking drapes, or we could go with the cheaper,
plain
ones. Enamel bath tub or plastic and the examples could go on and
on.
Fortunately, there’s one particular area of your house that
you won’t have to
sacrifice anything to get the best of: your floor.
Let’s take
a look at how to
install hardwood floor yourself properly and without too much effort.
Before we get into actually
laying hardwood floors, let me emphasize on the fact that most of them
are made
with home users in mind, so they’re extremely easy to install
yourself.
You
don’t have to be a building wizard or even passionate about
do-it-yourself
stuff, as long as you can fit two matching shapes (and I bet you did
since you
were a child) you’re good to go.
In some cases, a little more effort is
required, when you will have to cut your hardwood floor tiles to
smaller pieces
to get exact fits for your room, but it’s not like you need a
PhD in
lumberjacking to do that either.
Regardless of the type of
hardwood flooring you’re installing, you’ll need a
precise saw to get your
panels to fit in the room, some adhesive solution (sometimes this comes
in the
same package as the floors) and a couple of free hours or more,
depending on
the size of the room.
As
you will notice, most of today’s
types of flooring
have small trenches on one length and one width and equally small
obtrusions on
the other length and width.
These parts fit, so you will have to
connect the bumpy
part of a panel to the cavity part of another panel. Sometimes,
adhesive is
used to keep the panels together and to stop them from getting pushed
apart
later on.
Unless you’re using floating
panels, you’ll need some extra adhesive when installing
hardwood flooring to
keep them glued to the ground. Start from one side of the room, from a
corner
and work your way down in rows.
Click in panel after panel, following
the
hardwood floor installation instructions I mentioned above and when you
reach
the other end of the room and a full panel doesn’t fit
anymore (unless you’re
extremely lucky!), measure the distance to the wall and cut a matching
panel of
the same dimensions.
Start on the next row and work your way progressively,
making sure each panel fits perfectly and there are no hollow spaces
between
them. Soon enough, you will see for yourself that it’s not so
hard learning how
to install hardwood floor all by yourself!
