Hey guys,

I am nailing Somerset solid maple 3 1/4". I established a working line through two rooms and a hallway, so that the longest runs of hardwood will look straight relative to their closest walls.

Now in the first room, as I am installing rows starting from my working line and toward the far wall, I stopped and measured the distance between the most recently-nailed row, and the far wall. There is about a 1" difference between the two ends, which means I'd have to cut the last row into a wedge shape to fit.

Actually in this case, with only 1", probably the expansion gap and trim might be able to hide this. But still, I'm curious if there is a trick you pros use for approaching a wall that, for one reason or another, is not square to your working line, and the trim doesn't let you hide it.

Do you simply wedge-cut ("scribe fit"?) the last row's hardwood strips and call it a day? Is there an easy technique for transferring the angle from wall to wood?

Or maybe I can impart a slight correction over 5-6 rows, by not nailing the rows super snug to one-another along part of their run, to negate the 'wedge' effect. (Maybe use thin washers as spacers to nail, then pop them out?) Kind of makes me nervous not to nail tight and I'd rather just go to the effort of doing a wedge-cut on the strips on the last row.

Most of the online articles just kind of hand-wave off the specifics of how to deal with this situation. Such as this one:



Apparently I just use my magic row-adjusting wand?

Help appreciated! Thanks!

On an unfinished floor, washers or any similar spacer works great because you can fill the gap left behind. On a pre finished floor, this can get a little ugly because you can't hide the gaps so easily.Filler in between microbevels usually looks really bad.

For pre finished, the harder but nicest looking method is to rip cut some rows to create the taper without leaving spaces. This is no picnic though because you will have to use a router to re groove the boards and you have to re create the microbevel by hand and possibly touch up the finish.It's a lot of work but very possible

Don Bollinger's book does a nice job of describing the options when dealing with this situation. If you're ok with a 1 inch taper at the far wall it will be apparent how to make the taper i.e. once you're close to the wall scribe a line that follows the wall on the un-nailed flooring. If you want to have less than a 1 " taper at the far wall, as the other poster suggested start ripping small tapers on floor boards in the field.

Thanks guys, that's perfect. I'll carefully re-measure to see exactly what the taper will need to be, and either make an adjustment in-the-field, or just scribe the taper in the last row.

Hopefully I can get away with just scribing the last row; since it's prefinished, it sounds like a bit of work to make adjustments in the field!

I'm just wondering why you didn't check the far wall/line before proceeding with the installation. You could have moved the line over a half inch. Course you probablky realize this now.

Can't tell from your post what the room and hall configuratons are but after you deal with your first room you may want to re-measure and possibly adjust your baseline to avoid the same problem, i.e. spread the discrepancies around so that all walls get to take up a small part of the adjustment instead of your far wall(s) getting it all.

We are flooring an entire upstairs area with an open floorplan of about 5 rooms without any transitions. So all the flooring will line up with the baseline that runs through the longest span, which is about 35 feet. This span includes the hallway and is the most visually intense, so we focused on setting a baseline that made this span square to its closest wall so that the flooring looks straight. We then made some adjustments to the baseline to ensure that the flooring meets the top of a stairway nosing without necessitating a little 1/2" rip.

But with 10+ walls in the equation, it didn't seem feasible to make an accurate baseline that met up with all of them exactly perfectly, so we are just hoping we don't end up with an awkward little 1/2" rip all along any particular wall.

I'm assuming that the stair tread/painted riser post is yours also. You mention here your baseline takes into account matching up with the stair nosing. Don't forget to keep the stair code in mind i.e. tread riser, tread run and overhang in mind when you do your planning. The stair code will prevail when it comes to what the nosing on the landing can be.

exactly

Update - well the first room was a pain in the neck. Not only was the flooring about 1/4" too short of going under the trim on both walls, but the walls were not even with the flooring, causing a bit of a taper.

So for the final super-narrow row, I've had to use shorter pieces so that I can step them down, and ripped them 9/16ths, 10/16ths, 11/16ths, 3/4, 7/8ths. Took me about 2 hours to carefully measure and rip all of it! Now I see why the pros would take more time with this, although again with 10+ walls in the equation, some of them are bound not work out.

But anyway, plugging along, learning, having fun with the table saw and nail guns. The only deadline is wife-imposed so it's not so bad.

Does this make you want to go back and adjust the baseline so that this doesn't keep happening? Keep this in mind when you approach and do the stairs. The 'spend a lot of time measuring before beginning the installation' is a recurring theme.....and now you have a real good idea of why.

I did actually spend a good 2 or 3 hours measuring and bouncing ideas off my wife before the install, about how to set a baseline that would have the most even visual appearance through the long hallway that joins two big rooms, and how best to meet up at the stairs. One problem is that it was not possible to measure exactly to the edge of the stairs, because I hadn't cut the nosing off of the stairs yet, pending looking up stair code and some other stuff.

Another difficulty was that I didn't trust doing the measurements on paper. For example, let's say the distance from my baseline to just under the trim of the far wall is exactly 65 inches. With 3.25" strips of flooring, on paper, that works out to exactly 20 strips of hardwood. So if I had set the baseline using this math, there are two possible outcomes:

1) There are no gaps, no warpage, no beginner mess-ups across 20 rows of hardwood, and the last strip of hardwood falls perfectly under the trim of the far wall. It's miller time!

2) Slight gaps, slightly warped wood, beginner foibles, all add up across 20 rows to cause the last strip to fall either just shy of the trim, or go too far underneath the trim and not honor the expansion gap. Time to rip a bunch of strips!

So far I've ended more with outcome 2) than with 1).

Could you post a diagram of the second floor layout? It would be helpful in making recommendations concerning the baseline, etc. Miller Time would make outcome #2 not seem so bad.