How To: Install An Inexpensive Wood Floor That Looks Like A Million Dollars

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  Step 1

  We ended up buying 1x4s (of the cheapest pine available) at Menards for $1.80 a board. So this floor cost us less then $300 for 500 square feet and that makes me very happy.

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  Step 2

  Squeaks fit right in around here and we wanted no gaps between the boards because the original floor boards had no space between them. To eliminate squeaks and groans you can put down a pad/underlayment between the sub floor and your new wood floor, you can also glue the floor down as well and you can also use some kind of spacer between your boards. These are all things that we chose to skip and all things that would eliminate the squeaking, groaning and shifting. For us having the floors look (and sound) like they’ve been here for 100 years was more important to us then living with squeaks.

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  Step 3

  Question I will undoubtedly be asked: Aren’t you supposed to run your new floor the opposite direction the sub floor is run? Yes, that is how you are supposed to do it and no that is not how we did it. In only about 1/4 of the flooring the old sub floor for the screened in porch remained, the rest was plywood so we just went ahead and did wrong. We regret nothing.

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  Step 4

  We bought 12 foot long 1x4s so they spanned the distance of the entire room – 8 foot long 1x4s would have been cheaper and would have made little to no waste but would have created lots of seams. This is one of those jobs that one person can do but is so much quicker and easier with two people that you really should have two people. With me cutting the boards outside and Joe nailing them down we laid all of the floor in under 3 hours. Other tools we used were a jigsaw and a skill saw for the tedious cuts.

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  Step 5

  We used a pine 1×8 to cover the uneven threshold between our dining room and our kitchen, I did not want the two floors butting up to each other to be compared as they are very different types of wood as well as slightly different in size. The threshold creates the stopping point that makes the two different woods/floors make a lot more sense to the eye. We sanded the floors together, using a far rougher grit sandpaper (35) on the original wood floor then we used out here (60). From there I applied one coat of stain to all of it by hand with a paint brush, laid it on there thick, let the floor soak up as much as it wanted and then, after about twenty minutes, wiped up the excess with old t shirts. From there we did two coats of a sealant with no sanding between coats, letting it be as rough as we could so they would look like they’ve been here forever.

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  Step 6

  All in this project of 500 square foot of wood flooring cost us less then $300.

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