DIY Plywood Plank Floors

Yes, that says Plywood Plank Floors! – Trust me, it’s easier than you may think! We did this in a bedroom! – People think they look like high-end expensive floors… However, we have discovered since then that it would be cheaper to do tongue and groove 3/4″ pine (the back side of wainscoting, which is the flat side, would be up – we plan to do the rest of our home with this). I’d say the bedroom, which is pretty good size, cost us about $225 total – including the lumber yard cutting the planks for us from the plywood sheets, the oil base stain and oil base satin finish polyurethane – we were advised to use oil base products for durability by a professional builder/remodeler friend, and the pine plywood seems to have a very hard surface. Because of squeaky floors, we put down sub-flooring first and then glued the back side of the planks with Liquid Nails, as well as used a pneumatic nail gun (note that we used large nail heads). We love the rustic old look it has! Perhaps someone can shed more light on the tongue and groove flooring idea. It makes sense cost-wise for us to do, and we have about 2,000 sq. ft. to cover yet! People online talk about using cheap finished 1 side plywood – we did a LOT of looking around our area (Western NY), and did not find anybody that carried anything like that.

Getting a good start!

Almost there! – and this went very quick with 2 people! – Maybe about 2 hours! I measured, he cut and applied the Liquid Nails, I placed the planks and used the Nail Gun! ?

Ready for sanding! Literally sat on my butt and used a palm sander, which is quite user friendly. We might try sanding before install next time, but it seems that all the “real” hardwood floor folks install then sand…

Stain before some more sanding! – This time, I did the sanding by hand (before applying the polyurethane) to have more control of the color. With the plywood planks (pine – finished one side), it sure soaked up the color! – Made me glad we chose a darker color stain!

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source: hometalk.com