We fell in love with this timber as soon as we set our eyes on the one sample plank. It was a brash decision to purchse. $400 cash on the spot and outta the warehouse that day if Ross, the owner had it his way. There was only enough to cover 22sqm. Just barley enough to cover our living and kitchen space. Perfect. (Well not as everyone says. You are meant to allow an extra 15% extra for errors and unusable offcuts so we were cutting it tight. Literally) Who could pass up $20 a square meter for imported, German made, Southern Chestnut. You can see from the picture below that we have lived with these planks behind our sofa for many months now. That's right. Taking up space. Precious, precious space. Remember our living and kitchen is 22 meters worth of floor space!
I know this other image of a bare concrete floor looks like nothing much, but believe me, Pete spent many long, back braking hours chiseling out the bumps to prepare a smooth surface for the underlay.
So finally I have included myself in my fancy-shmants renovation outfit. We had just ripped up the floor. Under the carpet, we found the original underlay. Looked like hessian. Ripping it up, it made the finest of dust. Horrid stuff. We rolled it all up ready for council cleanup. After a bit of scrapping and vacuuming, we started on the underlay. We purchased a product called "Silent Shield" from Harvey Norman. It's priced at $10 a square meter and its pretty thin compared to some more expensive and better quality products, but they have the ratings and tests to prove it works which is the main reason to purchase it. An acoustic underlay was essential in an apartment block (if not on the ground floor), else we could have gotten away with underlay for around $5 or less per square meter.
It is recommended that you open a few boxes of the timber at a time to balance out the colour tones as being a natural product, we had to pick our planks wisely for colour variation. We purchased a kit that contains wedges, a mallet and a block to hammer the wood in. There was as "s" shaped metal tool in the kit to assist in hammering a plank when they are close to the wall. We bought this from Bunnings and installed the floor ourselves. I would definitely install a floor again in the future. The tongue and groove in the timber makes it really easy to hammer together. We glued together each piece with waterproof woodworking glue. It took us all Saturday and Sunday to finish it but this included ripping up the old carpet, and a trip out to Bunnings and Harvey Norman for some extra supplies like more glue and 1 meter extra of the underlay.
Here are some before and after shots of the finished work. We are yet to put on skirting board, but for now, we have finished the main part of the floor. Out of all the projects we have tackled so far, I would have to say the floor was the easiest and most dramatic update. It's aesthetically so different and beautiful to what was there before, and only for a few hundred dollars. Compared to the kitchen and ceiling, even painting, the floor was a pleasant surprise.
Tadah!
No wait...There one more thing and its an important bit, even though its just a bit...We are short just 50liniar centimeters. We used every board that we purchased. There was even a random timber board that wasn't part of the same batch that we used as an extra (looked close to the same though you wouldn't even pick it). The photo shows all that we had left. Mathematically it was impossible to match all tounge and grooves without having any offcuts. Ironically when pieced all together, they would fill the gap we have left in the corner. Now for my next ebay purchase: "One Offcut Southern Chestnut Wood Timber Floorboard German Made Pick-Up Sydney BNWT".
This is still not a lesson learned. It was still worth it.
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