Installing Bamboo Flooring

If you have decided to install bamboo flooring, then here are the things you need to remember and do.

You first need to check if the flooring has already been acclimatized to conditions of humidity conditions prior to installing it. The acclimatizing time which is recommended would be a minimum of 7 days in the rooms or areas where your bamboo flooring would be installed. Make sure that the flooring is dispersed as much as possible. However, if this would not be possible, then you could probably break boxes, or probably make smaller stacks or open ends. And then before you start to install them, check the moisture content on a couple of samples which have been randomly picked.

The tools and accessories that you would need would be: measuring tape, square, miter saw, sawhorse, handsaw, chalk line, hammer, crowbar, vacuum cleaner, drill bits, drill, nail punch, level, safety goggles, hardwood hammer and a rubber hammer.

How to Install Bamboo Flooring

Here are the easy steps for proper installation.

1. Determine the longest wall of an area or room where you will be installing the bamboo flooring. This wall should be perpendicular at the joists, as the bamboo flooring strips also have to be perpendicularly installed to the joists.

2. Make sure that you will be allowing some space for a 13 to 19 millimeter expansion joint to be placed in between the wall and your bamboo flooring strips. This joint would be hidden using a quarter round or a baseboard.

3. Craw a guide line which would be parallel to the wall using a chalk line. Then you could try computing the distance of this guide line and the wall by adding the widths of the expansion joint, the strip flooring and the tongue.

4. You can nail down the first row through drilling holes on the strips first. The drilled holes should be drilled around 13 millimeters from the side and 25 centimeters from center to center. You would also need to drill holes at its tongue, using a 45-degree angle. With the use of some spiral roll shank nails, start fixing the first row of the bamboo strips while checking that they will be properly aligned with the line of chalk, which you drew. After that, try using a nail punch so that you would be able to properly conceal the nails.
 
5. On the second row, drill the holes at an angle of 45 degrees at the top of the tongue and then nail it using spiral roll shank nails. You can try using a nail punch once again so that you can properly conceal the nails.

6. When ending a row, you have to cut the flooring strip on the correct length and then use the strip’s remainder in starting the next row.  Make sure that you will be leaving enough space at the end of every row for the expansion joint.