Removing the Floor

Overall it was a good day. I woke up early at 6:30, thinking about the new webcam. It didn’t take long to get it up and running (I’d been up until midnight playing with it and getting it to work on our wireless network), and I think it’s a cool feature for the site. Did anyone watch me pull up the floor today?

Speaking of which, I pulled up a bunch of the floor today. We’ve got an original fir floor covering the majority of the first floor, and I love it. Today (well, before today) it has an extremely worn finish, in fact, most of the finish is worn completely away.

Our house currently has forced air, and it’s not so forceful – our furnace is on its last legs, and the air ducts were never sized properly in the first place. Our plan is to install radiant floor heat, and to do that we’re pulling up the fir. Once the tubing goes down we’ll reinstall the fir and have it professionally finished.

I’ve never removed a floor before, and my main concern going into it was that I’d split the wood or damage the tongue and groove. I got lucky, because I discovered an easy way to release each floorboard without damaging it. Here’s how much I got done:

If you don’t own one of these, you should buy one on your next trip to Home Depot or Lowes (and according to the poll, I know you shop there plenty…):

This is a “nipper”, and it’s main job in my home is nail extraction. I especially like it for its ability to efficiently remove finish nails from wood. The easiest way to remove a finish nail is to grab it from the back-side with the nipper, and lever it through the wood – pulling the small head all the way through the wood. This is usually better than pounding the nail out in reverse because you don’t risk having the recessed head splinter the wood on its way back out the front side.

It turns out the nails that were used to nail my floor down (the nails are pounded in at an angle from the side of each board), all have heads. These heads are easily gripped by the nipper, and I can remove each nail, completely freeing the board. Nice and neat. Here’s the sequence: find it, grip it, lever it, remove it:

Tomorrow, it’s on to the rest of the floor.