How To Lay A Wood Floor Straight

How to find a straight line when installing wood flooring.

How to lay a wood floor straight.

It is very important that the first few floor boards you lay down are perfectly straight across the room this prevents your floor from looking crooked or slanted across the room. They must be absolutely straight and laid without gaps or bends. Begin with the longest most straight wall. Learn how to install solid hardwood flooring with a few simple tools.

The eye perceives the angle as disorder and it s difficult to correct. Fortunately powernail sent me their new model 2000f 20ga. Properly laying the first three boards in a hardwood flooring installation is essential to a quality install. Hardwood floor nailer to test out which they claim is specifically designed to install brittle tongued flooring.

Put the first board up against the mason s line with the groove side facing away from the walls. Keep the lengths random and at least 6 in length. The first three boards set the tone and direction for the floor. When a hardwood floor is not straight it throws off the sightline of the entire room.

Before you can begin nailing or gluing down the planks for your wood floor you must establish a straight line from wall to wall across. Lay out a box of hardwood boards ahead of the installation to visualize lengths wood grain and colors of the boards. This nailer is much smaller than a traditional hardwood flooring nailer and doesn t require a mallet to hit the nail gun and shoot the nails. Since wood is a dimensionally imperfect material this can be a challenge to get right but the extra effort is worth the time investment.

When laying out the boards keep in mind to never have the ends of boards in adjacent rows line up with each other. Here s how to install click lock engineered hardwood flooring. Using the longest most straight floor boards you have.