On with the flooring installation! Resident flooring expert Wes has been ultra helpful with responding to all my PM’s!!
So thought I would summaries how I went about it….
Flooring picked by my good wife was 18mm oak hand scraped engineered wood flooring – 5mm real oak, length 300>1200mm. Tounge and groove. @ £35/m^2. As it is an older property we felt the hand scrapped feel was more suited.
Flooring was acclimatised in the room within its own packaging for 10days, @ 18degC, 45 to 60RH. So not to feel left out we headed to Portugal to do our own acclimatision …
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First was to clear the room… swept and hovered, making sure the joints between the plywood sheets was clear to allow for subfloor expansion. I also removed the radiators – this kit (£10 on ebay!) made it very easy to empty the system without wetting any of the floor.
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Next was to determine where to start the flooring…… The living room, front hall and rear hall are all being floored. The feature in the living room was the slate hearth and I wanted to run the flooring parallel to this.
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Wes advised that I should check that if I started with a full width on the opposite wall that I didn’t end up with a sliver in front of the hearth…
I struck a line parallel to the hearth and one parallel to the opposite wall – it was found that these were within 4mm – so assuming the end boards were wide enough this should not be noticeable.
I had to narrow the board width by 40mm along the opposite wall, as the full board width did create a 20mm sliver at the hearth and also on the fire wall as can be seen here:
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I also undercut the hearth to ensure the wood could expand under it without the need of a cover strip.
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I bought a porta nailer 402 kit from ebay along with some 50mm T cleats. This should keep the flooring well attached to the 18mm plywood subfloor!
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Before laying any of the floor the subfloor moisture content needs checking…not having any fancy meters I just my one for my wood burning stove….
Flooring needs to be sub 9%, which mine was.
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We then rolled out the craft paper which has a tar layer inside - this acts as a moisture barrier.
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We transfer our chalk lines onto the craft paper and proceeded to measure and mark the planks that needed narrowing. These were cut on the table saw.
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After the wall board lengths were narrowed, we dry fitted these to work out the flooring for window reveal. These were cut and 30mm holes cut for the central heating pipes:
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We then secure the back board with screws under where the skirting will sit as the prota nailer is unable to secure the first row planks due to foiling on the wall. The narrow planks were secret nailed through the tongue. Once the full length was secured we double checked that the row was running parallel to our datum. Crazy how long it takes to just get to this point but I am sure it will be worth the effort.
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My wife then selected the plank order and racked them out.
I proceeded to nail these in. We did find as the board are random lengths between 300mm>1200mm, out of the 12 boxes our longest length is 900mm – which has meant it has been hard to avoid H & step pattern…… Just trying to do our best.
Got about 1/3 of the flooring down. The end of the day my back & thighs were a tad tender!
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Will try and get the rest finished at the weekend….
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I'm not the best at explaining this stuff without a thousand words 
Once you've used the tape to pull the rows together, bridge the length join with tape so the boards don't open up. Then simply carefully cut the handle tape at the hearth. 
