Finishing the Living Room

I've been working on the living room for the past few weekends. On February 9th, I was almost finished, but we had to go off to a shower (more on that later). When I sink a cleat flooring nail most, but not all of the way into a board, it's very difficult to remove without damaging the flooring, and they're very difficult to drive all the rest of the way in with a nail set, so I'd struggled with a few of these before Shawn suggested that I use a Dremel to cut off any exposed nail surface. That has worked fairly well, so I've been using that strategy ever since. It throws a lovely shower of sparks. I'm not sure what causes some of the sparks to fork in mid-air, but it does make for a good picture.

When you can use the pneumatic flooring nailer, it makes fairly quick work of installing flooring. I'm able to do about three courses in an hour in the living room, and I'm still pretty new at it. When I can't use the flooring nailer, it takes a lot more time. As you get close to the wall, you run out of room, and you need to use another strategy.

Initially, tried using Shawn's brad nailer for this, but it's just not accurate enough for my tastes, and at times the brad nails deflect. Perhaps with a very accurate sense of where the nailer will drop the nail (or a nailer that makes that more apparent) and fewer deflections (better nails? better nailer? not sure...), I'd go this route.

For my uses, though, I only have so much flooring to do, and I found it simpler to pre-drill, put in a spiral nail, and nail-set it. Takes a while, but it takes longer to brad-nail a strip of flooring and then take it out again when it gets screwed up.