Loft

April 11

TEMP: 85°/ SUNNY

Since we had the beams up, laying the loft floor was pretty straightforward. I first prepped the tongue and groove 1x6 pine by lightly sanding then adding polyurethane. The beaded side would be down so you'd see that as the ceiling in the bathroom and part or the kitchen. I gave this side 2 coats as it won't have to worry too much about getting banged. The top, which will be the floor to the loft, will get 4 - 5 coats as this will get more traffic, but I will do this once it is in place.

To begin, we added a stair nosing the whole width of the loft. This gave us a really nice edge to line all of the floor boards against.

Start with one piece, cut to length, with the groove side positioned against the left wall. For this first piece you need to face nail it. We used the smallest of the 3 Bositch nail guns that we have. Having these nail guns make most things SO much easier. We nail along the left side of the board about every 8". On the left side of the board you can mail into the tongue which then gets covered with the next boards groove. This is great because aside from the first and last board, all nails are hidden. Even the face nails we had to make in the first and last will be covered by a thin baseboard so the whole floor will look nail free.

You lay the whole floor this way. When a board doesn't slide right in, you can bang it into place with a mallet. The final piece we had to cut as a full piece didn't fit the whole width of the loft. 

I have since gone back and polyurethaned the floor. I first sanded the whole thing and am adding coats to give it a nice seal.