Homeowner Forum / Construction / October 2006

With any reasonable quality plywood easily costing northwards of a buck
per square foot, unfinished, it's unlikely that you'd be able to save
any money at all.  And that's before putting any value on your time.

http://www.lumberliquidators.com/home.jsp is a discount house with
stores all over the country.  If you're flexible in look and species, I
can't see how you'd beat such low prices making your own.

Your plywood scheme also short changes the future life of the floor.  A
good hardwood floor should last through a minimum of three or four
refinishings - a few decades at least.  Plywood wouldn't allow any
refinishing.  Even with a supplemental thicker veneer on top (you'd
need to put an equally thick veneer on the underside, oriented in the
same direction, to balance the plywood or you'd be guaranteed to get
cupping and other deformities) you'd still only get a couple or three
refinishings.

You should save the money-saving-effort for somewhere you'd actually
save money - now and in the future.

R

Not to be a buzz kill but I think you are out of your mind.

Pull a sheet of BC grade plywood (I won't even consider CDX any more) off
the shelf and notice the number of knots, voids and overall complete lack of
straightness.  The chances that you are going to edge nail an 8" wide strip
and have it lay flat on the floor without flexing every time you step on it
are slim.  For the cost of nice looking furniture grade plywood you can buy
flooring.

If you are going to put down a wood floor, what's the point of painting it?
Unless you glue on a very thick veneer, forget about staining as the glue
holding the veneer will screw up the evenness of the stain penetration.  A
surface only finish like a polyurethane would work.

Wood over concrete only if the concrete is extremely well sealed, well
drained and the concrete is above grade.  Unless you are the kind who thinks
mold smells nice.  If it's concrete, put down tile or sheet vinyl.  If you
were willing to tackle making your own wood flooring, learning to lay tile
will be something you can handle and it will be a hell of a lot nicer than
strips of plywood.  They even have vinyl tiles or sheet vinyl that look just
like wood.

For some practical options -

1 - For the massive amount of labor involved in your proposal you would be
better off taking a part time job and earning the money to buy proper
flooring.

2 - Visit your local town's permitting office and see who is pulling
demolition permits.  There are all kinds of older industrial buildings and
older houses that are "in the way" coming down with plenty of nice lumber to
pull up.  About 1 mile from where I live, the local fire department set fire
to a perfectly good house and barn to make way for a new shopping center.

3 - Visit your local town's recycle stores to see what kind of deals they
have.  Habitat for Humanity runs some in larger cities.

4 - Have a chat with some carpeting installers as they are heading out to
jobs in the morning.  Sometimes they do commercial jobs where they pull up
perfectly good carpet because the new head person wants to change the decor
and trash big rolls of perfectly usable carpet.  I've yanked a couple rolls
out of the dumpster and used it to put down carpet in storage areas.  Yeah,
it's not wood but it's free and goes down with minimal labor.

5 - If you live out in the country there are always old houses sitting out
there.  My WWII vet neighbor had an old house on his property.  The entire
house - floors, exterior walls, interior walls, ceilings; was tongue and
groove pine milled on site about 100 years ago.  At this point the roof
leaked and the house was falling apart so I asked if my wife and I could
pull off the usable lumber.   He said "Only if it don't cost me nothin".
Got about 3 pickup loads.  Doesn't cost anything to stop and ask.

Good luck.
Steve.

The best engineered wood has a top layer about the same depth as the T&G
(say 5 or 6mm on a 20mm floor). That way you can sand it down the same
ammount as a solid wood floor. By the way the best Engineered wood floors
are slightly more expensive on average than solid wood floors (in the UK at
least).

Given budget considerations, you might look at what Ira Kurlander did
with hardboard/Masonite in his article for Fine Homebuilding on
"rock bottom remodel": http://www.taunton.com/store/pages/fh_toc_012.asp
The article was reprinted in the Fine Homebuilding book, "Remodeling".
My recollection is that he cut heavy hardboard into 2x2 or 4x4 panels,
nd used that as tiles on the floor, probably with a sealant of some sort,
and they were holding up well at the time the article was written.

I suspect he used something like Masonite Tempered, which is used for
stage flooring, but I don't remember anything more... it's been years
since I've seen the article.

General look was sort of "leatherish".

Kay