• Home
  • about emily
  • before + after
  • HGTV + DIY Network
  • good press
  • contact
  • Let’s Organize These Posts:

    • Art Attack
    • Backyard
    • Barn
    • Basement
    • Bathroom
    • Beach
    • Bedrooms
    • Being Thrifty
    • Business-y
    • Buying and Renting and Selling
    • Casual Celebrations
    • Closets
    • Curb Appeal
    • Dainty Details
    • Deck
    • Decor
    • Dining Room
    • DIY
    • Dog-Related
    • Entryway
    • Flooring
    • For the Kids
    • Garage
    • Gardening
    • Helping The Economy
    • HGTV + DIY Network Projects
    • Holiday-Related Projects
    • Home Safety
    • Kitchen
    • Lighting
    • Living Room
    • Merry Travels
    • Office Space
    • Organized
    • Other Pads
    • Outdoor Living
    • Scooter Fun
    • Stairwell
    • Sunroom
    • Supporting Sponsors
    • The Art Room
    • Tools
    • Uncategorizable
    • Wedding
    • Windows
    • Work-pads
  • Search

  • Hi, I’m Emily

    Emily Fazio

    I'm a home improvement enthusiast, living a very merry DIY lifestyle.

    You can find me writing for HGTV and DIY Network, follow me on facebook and instagram, or drop me a note if you'd like. I love notes.

    Thanks for visiting!

  • BROWSE POSTS BY CATEGORY:

    • Art Attack (7)
    • Backyard (92)
    • Barn (8)
    • Basement (27)
    • Bathroom (43)
    • Beach (13)
    • Bedrooms (73)
    • Being Thrifty (53)
    • Business-y (12)
    • Buying and Renting and Selling (23)
    • Casual Celebrations (36)
    • Closets (17)
    • Curb Appeal (44)
    • Dainty Details (8)
    • Deck (23)
    • Decor (286)
    • Dining Room (37)
    • DIY (577)
    • Dog-Related (24)
    • Entryway (59)
    • Flooring (58)
    • For the Kids (32)
    • Garage (17)
    • Gardening (70)
    • Helping The Economy (30)
    • HGTV + DIY Network Projects (283)
    • Holiday-Related Projects (80)
    • Home Safety (12)
    • Kitchen (83)
    • Lighting (31)
    • Living Room (77)
    • Merry Travels (21)
    • Office Space (21)
    • Organized (41)
    • Other Pads (14)
    • Outdoor Living (12)
    • Scooter Fun (8)
    • Stairwell (20)
    • Sunroom (22)
    • Supporting Sponsors (43)
    • The Art Room (3)
    • Tools (43)
    • Uncategorizable (1)
    • Wedding (28)
    • Windows (14)
    • Work-pads (10)
  • Search

  • Pages

    • blog
    • Merrypad Features
    • Privacy Policy
    • about emily
    • before + after
      • before + after, our current home
      • before + after, our first house
    • contact me
    • choose a badge and share the merrypad.com love
  • Home
  • about emily
  • before + after
  • HGTV + DIY Network
  • good press
  • contact

Racking Out

October 22, 2013

Let’s quickly remember the weekend when Pete went out of town and I spent 10 hours racking floorboards by myself in maternity leggings, with Cosmo radio blasting, successfully emptying 13 of the 85 boxes by prepping the hallway, the nursery, and Julia’s bedroom for the installation of our maple flooring. I slept great.

Pete snapped these photos the day on Friday, the day before he left, as I worked through my first ditch effort at racking the floorboards. And yes, as of this weekend I am officially in my 9th month of pregnancy. Do those kneepads make me look big?

Installing hardwood flooring while 9 months pregnant.

Worth noting, on Saturday morning, I tore the entire hallway rack job all apart and started from scratch.

Racking’s a great practice and major time-saver; it allows you, the installer, to get a handle at how the boards fit together prior to installing them, to see how they look, so that when it comes time to actually nail the boards in, there’s already some thought behind the placement of each board. To put some values around this practice, I suspect that the 10 hours I spent this weekend probably saved us 20 hours of negotiations if we tried to rack on the fly.

But the thing about racking floorboards (and laying them out in general) is, come to find, by industry standards, it looks super amateur if you break simple rules (I read all about these rules here, and then proceeded to chew all of my fingernails down to stubbies while obsessing over every last detail). No H’s, no steps, no close joints (in our case with 5″ boards, I needed to try and keep each seam 10″ apart). It all translates to the racker (for lack of a better job title?) wanting to pull their hair out.

It was a labor of love, those 10 hours of masterful amateur work, and totally worthwhile. I went from left to right and learned quickly that laying a single course at a time was critical to my sanity and my ability to see the overall vision. My mission with the long hallway–read: the most unobstructed, long running span in our house–was to have the longest, most consistently colored floorboards running in perfect doesn’t-look-amateur sequence. It was probably the most challenging space to start, so I took my job pretty seriously.

Floorboard racking in the hallway.

I can’t say enough how much easier racking floorboards is once you sort the inventory by length. Not only does it allow you to see the coloring and filter through them in that manner, but in a pinch, when you know you need to find a perfect 46″ board, you know what’s at your fingertips. I’ll come back to commenting on the uggo floorboards tomorrow.

Make quick decisions while flooring: Organize your inventory by length.

In going directly down the hallway, I laid the premium underlayment product that we purchased from Lumber Liquidators before I even started to rack the boards (this way, it was already in place when we were ready to actually begin nailing it in). We were advised to upgrade (of course) due to the product’s qualities to better absorb sound (less click-clack) and better insulate our main living space from the cold basement. With only 100 sq. ft. per roll, we had to buy several rolls for each room and almost two of them went into the hallway itself.

Unfurling the underlayment was easy enough to do myself; it fits beneath the freshly trimmed door jambs perfectly, and floats nicely beneath the floors, though it is like walking on ice in ballet flats. When it came time to cover more square footage with the stuff, the process was simple thanks to an adhesive strip that seals the long edge of two pieces together for insulative purposes.

Installign the foam underlayment in the hallway for the new flooring.

After finishing the hallway (and proudly boasting of my achievements to Pete, my mom, and my sister via text), I progressed right into the nursery at the end of the hallway, and laid 2/3 of the entire room in a feat of overambitious strength; the bedroom installation itself requires us to flip the direction of the boards, tongue of each facing to the left now, and because we aren’t doing formal thresholds for clean line-of-sight purposes, we invested in splines (a joiner, or a fake tongue in essence, used to connect two grooves together). The bedroom was considerably easier because at that point I had fine tuned the harder skills and already pre-sorted my flooring inventory, and also because I cared a little bit less if the floorboards weren’t perfectly matching in color (it is natural maple, for goodness sake).

The reflection immediately brightens this room, the darkest of the bedrooms, and makes me so pleased with our decision to remove the carpet. Because the boards are still loosely fit at this point, the boards are each a little more prominent than they’ll be in the end. I can’t wait to get it done.

Nursery flooring, racked wonderfully.

I could only rack so much into Julia’s room, what with the heavy bed and loads of full flooring boxes in my way. Her room, and the angle of this photo helps to demonstrate the heating baseboard that we’ll be working around throughout most of the house. It’s installed high enough on the wall that we won’t need to undercut or relocate the piping height, and deep enough that it will actually help us disguise rough wood ends much in the way you would rely on traditional wooden baseboard. Mostly, it makes the installation process a bit easier and neater, which hopefully translates to faster.

Finishing up my weekend by racking floorboards in Julia's room.

More to come.

Any other flooring enthusiasts partake in installing their own maple? How’d it go? Any tips?

Share

Bedrooms  / DIY  / Flooring

Emily
I'm a home improvement enthusiast, living a very merry DIY lifestyle. I've been a freelancer writer for 10+ years and you can find my work on popular home and garden sites, like HGTV.com. Follow me on facebook and instagram, or drop me a note.

4 Comments


Elisa
October 22, 2013 at 9:10 am
Reply

Gosh this’ll look SO good when completed! And the student midwife in my has to say it.. if you get a nice deep squat (knees to shoulders) while you’re laying flooring it will REALLY help you out in about a month. Alright, I’m done. Hah. Good luck!



    Emily
    October 22, 2013 at 11:59 am

    Oh thank goodness. I hoped that would be the case. Squat on, I will! Thanks for the encouragement!

Emily Boyle
October 24, 2013 at 6:54 pm
Reply

OMGeeee! The floor is going to look SO awesome! Also, you’re adorable (and I’ve also heard the same about squats). :)



TheMete
January 30, 2019 at 2:02 am
Reply

I personally prefer to remove all existing skirting, lay the flooring, then install new skirting. Gives a much nicer finish that makes the flooring look more like it was always part of the room.



Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • HI, I’m Emily

    Emily Fazio

    I'm a home improvement enthusiast, living a very merry DIY lifestyle. Follow me on facebook and instagram, or drop me a note if you'd like. I love notes.

    Thanks for visiting!

  • Instagram

    merrypad

    Merrypad by Emily Fazio
    Instagram post 17902304861708711 Instagram post 17902304861708711
    Highly recco mining those #herkimerdiamonds ✌️ Highly recco mining those #herkimerdiamonds ✌️
    Pt. 2: Well before Halloween, the last of the garl Pt. 2: Well before Halloween, the last of the garlic went into the home garden: 10 rows [L>R] 6 whole Nootka Rose as an experiment, 3x8 Mennonite-grown cloves from Aman’s, and 6x8 (and, I think, total 112? notes are cryptic) “normal.”
#gardennotes #growinggarlic #garden2023 #whatisnormal #merrypadathome
    Out of sight but [documented so it’s] not out of Out of sight but [documented so it’s] not out of mind! #garden2024 kicks off with my favorite biennial: elephant garlic! 15 cloves planted from small, to medium, to enormous. #gardennotes
    Annual garlic notes for #garden2023, pt. 1: this i Annual garlic notes for #garden2023, pt. 1: this is getting ooc, and I love it. 👩‍🌾🧑‍🌾

🧄 65% of the planting is in a new plot in the country. 🧄 Seeing if NR grows bigger with more sunlight. 🧄 Big @chasefarms cloves from 2021 were really productive in our home garden; can’t wait to see how they can show up next year in the new space. 🧄

Hand-turned a small bed, but big thanks to my sister, who rolled into town just in time to help me double its size (and did not complain once).
    One straggler from #garlic2021 debuted with 7 stal One straggler from #garlic2021 debuted with 7 stalks and 7 scapes, and I can’t wait to see this mammoth looks like when it’s pulled next month. #garlic2022 

Also, fierce springtime performance by parsley, chamomile, and self-seeded cilantro.
    Annual garlic notes #garden2022 ~315 cloves total Annual garlic notes #garden2022
~315 cloves total
50 in new, unfenced garden
Still need thick mulch on everything
Did a terrible job tracking varieties when I harvested, so it’s all a mix of hardneck now 😒
Added some big cloves from @chasefarms and look forward to adding some @fruition_seeds in #garden2023 when @porterfarmscsa delivers.
    Load More... follow emily: @merrypad



  • Like Us On Facebook

    Facebook Pagelike Widget



  • Popular Posts

    • How to fix an IKEA drawer. The Easy Fix For Broken IKEA Drawers 66.7k views
    • DIY sideboard rehab. 7 Steps for Restoring an Old Midcentury Sideboard Buffet 56.6k views
    • How to design and make a barn quilt. How to Make Your Own Barn Quilt 49.9k views
    • How to hang art on brick surfaces using specialty clips. The Easy Way to Hang Art on Brick or Stone 39.9k views
    • DIY driveway removal. The Driveway Rocks 35k views
    • Our DIY flagstone patio. Building a Flagstone Patio in One Day 32.7k views
    • Tips for dying pasta different colors, and a Halloween Recipe for the kids. How to Dye Pasta Different Colors (Halloween Recipe) 32.5k views
    • Goodbye, gold fireplace covering. Less Is More: How to Remove a Fireplace Surround 29.5k views
    • Fix an ikea dresser drawer. Life Support For An IKEA Dresser 29.4k views
    • After: Custom wooden garden fence. Designing a Durable Wooden Fence For Our Beautiful Backyard Garden 22.9k views



  • BROWSE POSTS BY CATEGORY:

    • Art Attack (7)
    • Backyard (92)
    • Barn (8)
    • Basement (27)
    • Bathroom (43)
    • Beach (13)
    • Bedrooms (73)
    • Being Thrifty (53)
    • Business-y (12)
    • Buying and Renting and Selling (23)
    • Casual Celebrations (36)
    • Closets (17)
    • Curb Appeal (44)
    • Dainty Details (8)
    • Deck (23)
    • Decor (286)
    • Dining Room (37)
    • DIY (577)
    • Dog-Related (24)
    • Entryway (59)
    • Flooring (58)
    • For the Kids (32)
    • Garage (17)
    • Gardening (70)
    • Helping The Economy (30)
    • HGTV + DIY Network Projects (283)
    • Holiday-Related Projects (80)
    • Home Safety (12)
    • Kitchen (83)
    • Lighting (31)
    • Living Room (77)
    • Merry Travels (21)
    • Office Space (21)
    • Organized (41)
    • Other Pads (14)
    • Outdoor Living (12)
    • Scooter Fun (8)
    • Stairwell (20)
    • Sunroom (22)
    • Supporting Sponsors (43)
    • The Art Room (3)
    • Tools (43)
    • Uncategorizable (1)
    • Wedding (28)
    • Windows (14)
    • Work-pads (10)





  • a little bit of everything, friends, DIY, and inspiration

    • Dadand.com < My husband and his BFF
    • DIY Network
    • HGTV
  • Some Legal

    Merrypad incorporates the occasional affiliate link to Amazon.com and Minted; we link to many other websites and products, but if it is in context of a paid sponsorship, it is always noted as such. Please review the privacy policy and contact me if you have any additional questions.

    Theme customized by Pete Fazio Creative, the guy from dadand.com.


© Copyright Merrypad