Wide Oak Flooring Installation Question

[Ed Hazel]

I have been thinking about putting in random width full-length three-quarter inch Oak flooring which I would make. This is for my home office which is a relatively small room approximately 10 x 12. My question is how wide does one dare to go, and how do you attach it to the floor? If you just use the standard nail through the tongue method do you have a problem with the boards cupping?

[George Bregar]

You will need to face nail the first course but then just nail the tongues. Narrow widths are better as they handle expansion better.

[Ed Hazel]

You will need to face nail the first course

I was also thinking about starting in the center, and machine a tongue on both sides of the center board.

[George Bregar]

Then you will need to face nail the last course on each side of the room. Have you milled flooring before?

[Ed Hazel]

Actually I have access to a old Yates four head molder but I think I would do these on a shaper with a power feeder, if I was going to make them all the same width then I would probably go with a molder.

[Ted Calver]

We had oak installed in a new house and the flooring guy warned us that the wider we went the more ripply the floor would be. We went with 3.5" and we do notice some cupping during certain times of the year. It has not been a problem for us, but I expect the wider you go the more pronounced the cupping might be.

[Scott T Smith]

Ed, it depends upon the milling pattern and thickness of the flooring.

If you're using traditional, 3/4" thick flat sawn oak, usually 3" - 4" is the max w/o too much movement. If you use quartersawn oak, you can increase that to 5" - 6".

However, if you use a thinner quartersawn board and glue it down with a high quality flooring adhesive (5/16" - 3/8" thick board with an urea or acrylic based floor adhesive), you can increase your widths up to 8" - 10" or beyond. This is presuming that you have a strong, well supported sub floor.

[Brad Shipton]

I made my own 4.5" Jatoba and the max. gap in the winter is around 1/32". Nobody but me notices that. In my living room I made I made some 10" wide planks and I ended up with two problem boards that the gaps are around 1/16". Carlisle floors offers lots of options up to 12" in width, but they have access to old growth lumber. If I were to do the 10" boards again, I would make engineered flooring.

The flooring adhesives Scott mentioned are typically rated for widths up to 8" for 3/4", and if you went to something like 1/4" or so, you could go even wider since you are essentially veneering then. I can only imagine working with wide 1/4" stock and trying to figure out how to weight it down while the glue cures. 1/4" works great for parquet, but I dunno about long lengths. Gluing is a great way to go, but it can be messy as heck to work with and if you ever want to remove the floor you will wind up pulling out the subfloor.

I nailed my wide planks the same as all the rest, but for a little added comfort to prevent cupping I also added some screws. Putting in 1000 plugs was not a great deal of fun, nor was chiseling the heads off. There is another wide plank floor example you can find here where he used only screws. Screws are generally not recommended by many since they prevent the boards from moving freely, and that causes noises and even damage to the boards. I know of a lot of others that have screwed theirs down, and it is even discussed in Charles Peterson's new flooring book.

Do you have a humidistat in your home?

Brad

[Jim Becker]

Blind nailing with a flooring nailer (tongue and grove milled lumber) and adhesive is what I would do. That's how the wide pumpkin pine flooring is put down in our home. I used a modified version of this recently to install new rustic wide pine in a room in the 250 year old portion of our home...the material I used was #2 without the T&G, so I used biscuits and blind nailing along with the adhesive. (Since it's winter, I used a low-VOC adhesive product) This will later be face nailed with cut nails, but they are more for decorative purposes...that floor isn't going anywhere now that the adhesive has cured.

[Ed Hazel]

thanks for the information guys.
I was planning on using three-quarter inch flat sawn red Oak. I was thinking probably no wider than 7 inches max. The house does have a humidifier.
So it looks like this is doable with the adhesive and traditional floor nailing. As this is just going in my home office and it is relatively small room I'm not really out much so maybe I will give it a try and see how it works. This will need to wait for warmer weather though.

[Scott T Smith]

Ed, one other thing - be sure to stack and sticker your flooring boards inside the house for a few weeks in order to let them acclimate. The best thing to do would be to take some readings with a moisture meter of some of your existing 3/4" material inside the home, and then leave the flooring boards stickered inside until they reach the same equilibrium.