Pine Floors for a Dummy Carpenter (Carpentry Week 1)

pine wood flooring

Welcome to carpentry week here at the Antisocial Network, where for seven days we will make fun of freelancers giving advice about carpentry and woodworking topics, even if they don't know jack about the subject. Especially if they don't know jack about the subject!. We'll start the week out with a guy who's displayed his ignorance on these pages before, eHow's Larry Parr. For the first day of carpentry week, Larry is gonna educate us on "How to Install Pine Flooring."¹ Sort of...

Now, according to Larry, "Pine flooring can also add thousands of dollars in value to a home, so it is important that you do the job right." Our first response to that statement is to wonder why, if you want to "do the job right," you're looking at eHow in the first place; but we digress. Larry, eager for all of us to increase the value of our homes, is here to tell us how to install...

"...one of the simplest and least expensive types of pine flooring for the do-it-yourselfer--common #2 pine lumber available at any hardware store or wood outlet."

Yes, we kid you not: Larry not only instructs us to use common pine lumber, he wants us to use #2 lumber instead of "select"; apparently to get that lovely knotty pine look. Of course, this dumbass informs his readers that "Boards should be perfectly flat and not twisted or warped," pretty much negating the instruction to use #2 lumber (though we suspect Larry doesn't know that).

• Buy six-inch boards and rip them in half to make 3-inch boards, even though a nominal 3-inch board isn't half the width of a nominal six-inch board and costs less than half as much as a 1 x 6 in most lumberyards anyway
• Cut 12-foot boards into 6-foot and 4-foot lengths. Since the butt joints must be on floor joists, you'll end up cutting those six-footers a second time if joists are 16" on center (4 x 16 = 64, 6 x 12 = 72... oops, Larry!)
• Parr says, "If the board on either of the two opposing walls is going to end up being too thin [sic], adjust your starting point..."  but we'll assume he means "too narrow"...
• You're instructed to install the flooring with 2½" nails -- not finish nails, just "nails." 
• You're supposed to face nail the boards, though -- since you aren't using finish nails -- there's no instruction to set the nails and fill the holes
• After you've nailed down the flooring, you "sand lightly if needed." Good thing, since those exposed nailheads would wreak havoc on a sander...

All right, we give up: Does Parr REALLY think a floor made with cheap shelf-grade pine, face-nailed with box nails, has any potential to increase the value of your home by thousands of dollars? With all the resultant wide gaps between boards, the nailheads sticking out, and the irregular joints? Is he friggin' kidding?! What we would most like to know is why our Dumbass of the Day wouldn't use pine tongue-and-groove flooring and rent a flooring nailer to install it. That way, the nails would all be invisible and you'd actually have a floor that would increase the value of a home -- not a floor that looks like something in an attic or a barn's hayloft! And to make matters worse, Larry never even mentions the possibility that your home is built on a slab and doesn't have floor joists. "Duh" much, Larry?

What a maroon!

¹ The original post was deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_4474307_install-pine-flooring.html

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