Laying Pre-engineered Bamboo Flooring

by Linda @ Home is Where My Heart is

Sixteen years of foot traffic on our upstairs hallway. It was time to replace with some pretty wood floors. You can read all about it here.

Here is a before picture with the yucky carpet. We are installing 3/8" x 5-1/8" Engineered Fall Harvest Bamboo Flooring from Lumber Liquidators. We paid $2.29/sq. ft. We chose to install a floating floor which means no glue or nails. The quarter round and transition pieces holds it in place. Each piece snaps together.

We pulled up the carpet and tacking strips. We made sure to leave about 4 inches of carpet more at each room entrance so we can add the transition pieces and pull and tuck the carpet into.

We also pulled out what seemed like a million staples!!

We used an occilating saw to cut out enough of the bottom of each door jamb for the flooring to fit underneath.

Like so....

After laying the underlayment for a moisture barrier, noise reducer and padding, we laid one row of flooring as a plumb line.

We tried to use spacers to keep a 1/4" gap around the perimeter but they wouldn't stay so we quit.

The first section of flooring we had to lay was the most difficult. Each piece had to be cut at a specific angle and specific size. Lots of mistakes and recuts during this section.

It did start getting easier as we got the hang of it. The straight aways were a piece of cake after this.

When we got to the stair sill, we had to rent an electric jamb saw to cut out enough wood to fit the flooring.

Look how pretty!!! One row left!

We couldn't lay the left side by the stairs until we got the stair bull nose piece for the first stair.

Even after many measurements we still ended with a small section up against the wall.

Here is the stair before the bull nose is attached. Come to my blog to see how the hallway looks now. We love it!! http://www.lindahomeiswheremyheartis.com/2017/03/the-hallway-is-completely-complete.html

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1 question

Janet on Apr 23, 2017

Did you allow the floor to acclimate to your interior temp? We installed floating strand bamboo and it buckled after about two weeks. Had to reinstall portion because 1/4 perimeter disappeared as flooring expanded. We live in Northern CA where there isn't any real humidty.

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