Beginning our whole month throwback series with our very first do it yourselfer post here on Grandma’s house DIY. How to put down an inexpensive wood floor! I can’t believe we hit our 400th blog post not too long ago and this year will mark EIGHT YEARS of my living here and blogging about it. Sharing my life out here with all of you guys and improving Grandma’s house has been such an incredible adventure. This post was first published on Aug 26, 2015 and our inexpensive wood floors are still looking good to this day! Here’s a few of our most recent entryway photos so you can see how nice it still looks before diving into the old post on how I did it.

Its pretty amazing to read back and realize how much has changed here at Grandma’s house! Here is the original post:

How to lay down your own inexpensive wood floor and make it look gorgeous! In a past life I had thought of the idea of buying solid oak plywood or particle board, cutting it into strips and using it as inexpensive solid oak flooring and I was told that I was an idiot and carpet was chosen instead (a far more expensive option when I had already exhausted my budget). As it turns out I was very right and cutting plywood into strips for a wood floor has been done and it is gorgeous!

CLICK HERE FOR THE UPDATED 2019 POST TO SEE HOW THESE FLOORS HELD UP AND HOW I’VE BEEN MAINTAINING THEM!

Just for the record your floor does not need to come out of a box that says “flooring” on it, nope, what makes a floor a floor is the fact that you walk on it! The only reason I did not opt for the plywood-cut-into-strips-option in my grandma’s house was because I didn’t own a table saw at the time and it still would have cost more then what I ended up paying! This inexpensive wood floor cost less then $300!

The idea to just use basic pine 1x4s for the floors in my Dining Room/Entry and Extra Bedroom came about when I found out I could buy what they call “furring strips” from a local lumber yard for less then $1 a board. Note: Furring strips are generally made of very rough material, its not pretty wood, it is the roughest pine that you can buy and its usually only used on something where it will be covered up. However, I have a very old farm house and only about 500 square feet to cover and an extraordinarily limited budget.

During the renovation, when I finally got to putting my new wood floor my local lumber yard was completely out of the furring strips I wanted to buy so, after many calls, I ended up buying 1x4s (of the cheapest pine available) somewhere else for $1.80 a board. Not as cheap as I had thought I would get however, it is much higher quality then it would have been had I went with the furring strips. So this floor cost me less then $300 for 500 square feet and that makes me very happy!

(If you need funding help with your home project, search for things like title loans with no job to what options are available. Or if you are looking for a house with a pre-built wooden floor, get in touch with Loving Phoenix Realty)

Click here for Quality Wood Flooring (that does come in a box lol)

You don’t need much for this installation but there are some things you can do that I chose not to do. Squeaks fit right in around here and I wanted no gaps between the boards because the original floor boards had no space between them. To eliminate squeaks and groans you can put down a pad/underlayment between the sub floor and your new wood floor, you can also glue the floor down as well.

You can also use some kind of spacer between your boards. These are all things that I chose to skip and all things that would eliminate the squeaking, groaning and shifting. For me having the floors look like they’ve been here for 100 years was more important to me then living with squeaks.

Question I will undoubtedly be asked: Aren’t you supposed to run your new floor the opposite direction the sub floor is run? Yes, that is how you are supposed to do it and no that is not how I did it. In only about 1/4 of the flooring the old sub floor for the screened in porch remained, the rest was plywood so I just went ahead and did wrong. I regret nothing.

I used a brad nailer and two inch long brad nails for this job. Two brads every few feet in a line down every board was plenty and looks very consistent.

I purchased 12 foot long 1x4s so they spanned the distance of the entire room so I had no seems. 8 foot long 1x4s would have been cheaper and would have made little to no waste but would have created lots of seams. I was attempting to make this inexpensive wood floor look as close to my original hardwoods as I could which has no gaps an no seems.

This is one of those jobs that one person can do but is so much quicker and easier with two people that you really should have two people. I used a jigsaw for the tedious cuts and a skill saw to rip the boards down if necessary.

I used a pine 1×8 to cover the uneven threshold between my dining room and my kitchen, I did not want my new inexpensive wood floor and my 100 year old hard woods butting up to each other to be compared as they are very different types of wood as well as slightly different in size. The threshold creates the stopping point that makes the two different woods/floors make a lot more sense to the eye.

We sanded the floors together, using a far rougher grit sandpaper (35) on the original wood floor then we used out here (60). From there I applied one coat of stain to all of it by hand with a paint brush, laid it on there thick, let the floor soak up as much as it wanted and then, after about twenty minutes, wiped up the excess with old t shirts. From there I did two coats of a poly acrylic with no sanding between coats, letting it be as rough as I could so they would look like they’ve been here forever. I love them!

All in this project of 500 square foot of inexpensive wood flooring cost me less then $300!

UPDATED September 7, 2017: So far the floors are holding up incredible! Like any wood floor you’re going to find yourself dealing with the dreaded scratches and just like any dark wood floor I find myself still at a loss on how to keep them clean! The trick is to just bite the bullet and sweep at least once a week and to put a good rug outside to make sure you get the sand off your feet before you come in! This is the rug I love and this is the broom/sweeper I use on a daily basis: A regular broom is just all kinds of inadequate when it comes to a wood floors.

Initially I had some squeaks because I chose to put the planks tightly together, a year later there are NO squeaks however now there is a tiny gap between each of the planks which is what I expected. With the changing in seasons (and I’ve got major changes because I live in northern Minnesota) wood is going to swell and move.

Because of the tiny gaps now in a couple of places you can see between the planks and I’ve gone back and added a little stain in those areas. If there ever comes a time that one plank gets irreparably damaged I could always just replace it but, so far, I’ve had no major accidents (knock on wood) and all of the scratches I’ve created have disappeared after being walked on after a few days meaning: they were only superficial and my sealant is doing its job!

After 2 years I would still recommend this wood floor to anyone!

And now, after nearly 8 years, we’re still happy with it too!