Fixing our floors

So in our old house, Matt and I had a dream of installing a hardwood floor. Because of this, Matt did a lot of research and I mostly listened and learned by osmosis. So for those of you out there that do not have the benefit of a Matt in your life to read copious amounts about hardwood floors and then tell you about it, I thought I'd do a short primer

First, there are two different sides to every board. (Ok, for those of you keeping count there's really six sides, but assuming top and bottom are obvious, there are 4 sides left and they come in pairs, so two sides isnt' inaccurate).

First, we have the tongue sides. These sides of the boards have a small protrusion in the middle.

Which brings us to the groove side, which is a convenient mirror image of the tongue

Now, if you were starting fresh with a new floor, you'd put down the first piece, use a fancy flooring nailer to put some nails through the tongue and then slot the next board's groove over the nailed down tongue and repeat until the flooring is done. The problem here is that since we dug boards out of the floor there are some sections where the above technique doesn't work super well. Namely in the places where a single board is left by itself, because there isn't a way to fit both the tongue and groove into a board from above, such as the top slot in the picture below:

So, to be able to put a board in that slot, you have to take the bottom off the groove to be able to wedge in the tongue and then drop the board into place. Now, taking off the bottom of the groove on both sides of the board is no small feat. In fact, we bought a fancy new table saw just for this purpose and also this cool little thing that allows you to use a dremel as a router.

And then you end up with boards that look like this:

 Once you have all the pieces cut, it actually goes pretty fast. We nailed down the ones we could, and glued the rest. Here's a pic of Matt doing some gluing in the small hole in the little bedroom.

Once we were done, we left some bricks on the glued boards overnight just to be sure the glue was holding.