Nail it down: Installing the bamboo floor

 As I suspected all along, removing the vinyl flooring and its underlayment, and repairing the subfloor required many hours of labor. Of course, I did not participate. I cheered on my contractor's employees; I inspected for broken and iffy old 1x6's, chalking X's and question marks onto them in all of the obvious places. I hovered. I took photos from the basement, up through the holes in the subfloor. (And I also worked on other things like making sure my old cabinets were picked up for reuse by The Rebuilding Exchange.)

John and Nolan, mid-catastrophe.

Those sleepers (visible in the picture, left, where the man with the shop vac is crouching) had to be removed and sawn down so that a new 3/4" plywood subfloor could be screwed on top of them and made level with the old 1920's, 1x6 subfloor in the rest of the kitchen.

After the sleepers were tapered and the wonky areas of the 1x6 subflooring were replaced with plywood, every single 1x6 was screwed down at every single joist crossing. Somebody worked late in to the evening to get that done and it made me very happy. I'm just a sucker for structural reinforcement, I guess.

Black tar paper and thin underlayment applied over subfloor.

90 year-old lumber, securely affixed
in place with a bucket of screws.

Sorry about not having any pictures of the actual installation going on. This extra-hard material needs a skilled installer. My contractor's best carpenter did a meticulous job and the final results are perfect. But right at the beginning, he and I disagreed about how the floor boards were supposed to be staggered. After the issue was resolved by him removing the planks he'd already nailed down, I left him in peace.

Finished floor.

And, remember the clearance issue with the swinging door? All that labor to level the old subfloor made possible this perfectly flush transition from old oak in the dining room to new bamboo in the kitchen.