Hey all.

I'm going to remodel the kitchen in my early 1920s house this year, and plan on putting a wood floor down. As such, I'm hoping some of you more knowledgeable about floors might offer some opinions regarding my plans. I'm a pretty knowledgeable hobbyist woodworker, but this is the first time I've dealt with flooring, and I'm not too proud to ask for advice.

The rest of my house has square-edged (no T&G), face-nailed, 5/16" thick oak flooring, either 7/8" wide or 1.5" wide. My plan is to install this same type of flooring in the kitchen, using ~1 1/16" wide x 5/16" thick quartersawn ash that I will mill myself (it's a small kitchen, and 5/4 ash is dirt cheap these days).

The house has settled appreciably, and the kitchen floor has a noticable slope and slight twist to it. No humps in the floor though. As such, the use of thicker/wider boards or anything T&G would be out of the question, but the pretty narrow/thin strips I've come up with should be able to follow the contour of the floor.

The kitchen subfloor is 7/8" T&G clear pine with one layer of 1930s linoleum (not vinyl) on top of it (5mm lauan/vinyl is on top of the linoleum now, but I'll be removing it). The house (located in Upstate NY) has a full heated basement. There's a window air conditioner on the first floor, which will help keep the humidity reasonable during the summer months. A dehumidifer also runs down in the basement during the summer.

The plan is pretty simple: mill the strips of ash and face-nail them down to the floor with a power nailer, fill the nail holes, sand everything smooth and apply a clear protective finish (I'm leaning heavily towards McCloskey GymSeal...I'm not a fan of polyurethane).

My thinking is that the narrow quartersawn strips of ash shouldn't have much of an expansion/contraction issue, and that if I lay the floor in late spring (when the humidity is about average), I should be fine. What I'm unsure of is whether or not I should put anything (like felt paper or something) under the wood. I'm also thinking of putting a coat of shellac on the underside of the flooring to seal it before I put it down, but if using some sort of underlayment instead would suffice, it would certainly make things easier. My initial plan is to nail down the flooring with 18 gauge, 1 1/4" long nails, spaced about 8" apart (that's about the spacing the rest of the house's flooring has). I figure that if the rest of the flooring has lasted 83 years nailed down like this, the new stuff should too.

Again, any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Chris