I still have an active license, and do bids, but lately I’ve been doing more work as an independent contractor for other flooring companies. This works well for me right now; there’s plenty of work in our area, and I learn new techniques.

In my own installations over the years, my business partner and I both paid attention to wood selection. We culled out the extreme light and dark boards and used them on the edges or discarded them, we buried the shorts in out-of-the-way places, and we avoided “H” joints as much as we could. If there were unusually wavy grain patterns on a board we'd toss it or use it in closets.

The two companies that I work for here both have good reputations, and also do high-end installations (in our area, 2 million dollar houses, and up). When I asked about their guidelines for wood selection, the answer I got from both of them was: “Use everything.”
Every last piece goes in, and they don’t worry about where it goes. This really ups the speed of the install—if I’m not concerned about color, length, and joints, I can rack a room a lot faster. ( Sometimes the joints are less than 6” apart, too, although they tend to avoid that.)

How how much attention do all of you pay to this issue? It helps that a lot of these jobs are dark stains, so the color issue isn’t as important there. It bothers me seeing shorts in doorways, for instance, but it must be working for these companies and their customers/contractors. I’ve got a big installation coming up in July, and I’m going to have to make a decision as to how lenient I’m going to be now that I’ve seen different approaches.

I've found in the past that there's only so much that I can ask the customer about their preferences beforehand. They're depending on me to produce a good-looking floor; they don't know what they're going to like or dislike until they see the final results. So it comes back to my standards, and what I think will be acceptable. I’d be interested in others’ opinions on this.

NWFA Guidelines and most mfg's suggest racking be 3 times the width of the wood. i.e. 3" wide offset 9" BUT with shorter pieces not always possible.

Well I had a lady say she didn't like those shorts installed in her million dollar house and the man (Mullican) sent out entire boxes of shorts. I ended up not using several boxes of shorts. Luckily they ordered way to much wood.

jdecker3 wrote:


I'd never heard that spec quoted. I was familiar with 6", because most of the flooring we lay around here is top-nailed 2" straight-edge. So with 7" plank, they're recommending a 21" spread between joints?



That is one thing I can tell the customers beforehand--if they really care about wood selection, they've got to over-buy more than just cutting waste. We can always take bundles back.

A friend of mine recently told me what he does with the shorts--he puts in whole rows of them, separated by some distance across the floor. That sounds workable to me, and I'll try it on the upcoming job.

I ended up using them shorts in her walk up closet. That was about 200sqft of pure torture. But I charged double for it. Still was not woth it.

Had one customer request I install shorts "under the bed" area in a guest room. I suppose if the next homeowner had the bed in the same spot nobody would ever see them.

It's a little safer in the master bedroom, because usually there's one area where the bed's going to go.

We tell ourselves we're going to bury shorts and bad boards in the closets and under the refrigerator, and it always turns out we have way more questionable stuff then we need for those areas. I learned early on that we had to make a decision about what we were going to use and what we weren't going to use, so that we could sprinkle the "bad" boards throughout the total square footage. We didn't want to find that we needed to use that stuff after all, and end up with it all in one room near the end of the job.

Alloy wrote:


Well, we're three days into that big installation, and either tomorrow or Friday we'll wrap it up. I tried using all shorts in one row, the way my friend says he does, and that didn't work. It made it hard to keep the rack going on either side of the shorts--too many joints to avoid. It also didn't look that good, to my eye.

Unlike the other two companies, I stopped putting aces out in the field almost immediately. This was red oak, and there were some white/blonde boards, many of them shorts. I tended to set them aside.

I also set aside the boards with too many wild grain patterns going on. The job foreman was walking around, looking at the material, and he said he wasn't impressed by it. I said that it was select, the highest grade he was going to see in T&G plank. He wasn't trying to give me a hard time, but I wonder what he was expecting.

We have a lot of cabinet overlap and appliance slots to bury this stuff under, so I didn't find it hard to leave them out on this particular job.
Farrell Wills

In addition to using them in closets we start our line and end rooms in shorts. For 2 reasons first they are usually fairly straight, and second we can install most rooms with few to no visible top nails. We put plenty of glue under the first row and last few (no tar paper there) and put up 2-3 nails on the tongue of the butt joint. The glue holds the groove side tight, when finishing the room the next row will hold the it in. On the first and final rows we do top nail under where the base board will cover including the short wall ends.
It's kinda hard to explain, but looks much better than 3-5 rows of top nails.

5thgenfloorguy wrote:


I can appreciate the fact that they're usually straight, and I hadn't thought of that. I really don't like trying to beat in bad-fitting boards when I'm right at the wall. Nailing the butt joints is something I haven't seen, but that and the glue seem like a solid hold.

We put the top nails in the soft parts of the grain on oak. Especially with stains, they disappear.

We rarely topnail, but with #2 we topnail into the knots when topnailing is needed.