Fitting Out the Floor: The Final Stage

Before I could start fitting in those long pieces, I had to cut out the corners where the saw couldn't make it all the way to the end of the run. To do this, I was going to use a circular saw and just freehand it. Luckily, these cuts were usually less than three or four inches, so they should be alright. I finally got everything cut, and the last stage before laying down those boards was to put that micro bevel on the pieces all along along this long cut edge.

To do that, I was going to move the chamfering bit into a palm router. It's got a bearing on it, so we could just set it on here and run it down the line. At this point, I had essentially two rows of material to put down all the way around, and I'm gonna have to lay them like this, which means that I've got a groove here, so there's nothing to hold this piece to the existing herringbone floor. So, one more pass all the way around with the groove bit that I use to cut the groove on the end of all these pieces to add a groove all the way around.

I finally made it all the way around the room with the last full row and now I've got to fill in the last gap up against the wall. If you've seen my flooring videos in the past, you know that you have to rip down a small strip to fill that gap, but you also have to leave a little bit of room for expansion, usually about 3/8 of an inch. So, I ripped this piece down and it's going to be faced nailed down into place.

The easiest way to get this into place is to take off the bottom of the groove so you don't have to hook it around the tongue; you can just drop it straight down. Now, I've got these pieces, I'm gonna drop them straight down, drill some holes in the top, and then drive in the nails. A lot of people don't like to put quarter-round on top of their wood, but we have it everywhere in our house, so I'm going to use quarter-round to go on top and fill this gap up against the wall.

This will cover the expansion gap but also probably will cover some of the nail holes. The rest of this is just like doing a normal floor; you have to cut very specific pieces to fit around doorways and to fit underneath the trim, and it's just a matter of getting the order of operations so that you can drop all the pieces into the right place.

Final Touches

One of the last things to do here, and I'm not going to do it on camera because I ran out of time, is to add some polyurethane to all of these cut edges. You can see here where we added the new bevel that it got rid of the polyurethane; it's a little bit lighter, and so the way to fix that is to go back and just put another coat now. You could recut the entire floor or you could just paint on a couple of coats within those cracks. I'm going to test it and see which one actually takes more time.

It may take less time to just do the whole floor again, so here it is; it's all complete, and I'm very very happy to have it done. It was a huge amount of work but I really like the way it looks, and it actually turned out to look a lot nicer than I expected. All the angles fit together really well; they run nicely up against the outer frame, so I call it a win.

This was a whole lot of work to do for just a small room, but there are some products you can buy specifically made for herringbone. They have it already cut to length, already grooved, already beveled, so you can just lay it down in the pattern and that would save you a huge amount of time.

Now, I would probably not do this pattern in a very large room but as an entryway or a highlight, I think it works great. One thing I'm not sure about this pattern though and I'm not seeing anybody else have trouble with this is about expansion and contraction of this section since it's captive within a frame. Usually, you put that expansion gap around the outside of the walls so I'm not sure how this will do.

I Guess We'll Find Out

I'd love to know what you think about this one; you can let me know down in the comments. I've got tons of other projects of all different types that you may be interested in check some of those out right there and don't forget to subscribe.

That's it for this one guys; thanks for watching, see you next time

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey I'm Bob and I like to make stuff today we're gonna lay down a herringbone floor in the past you've seen me lay down hardwood flooring in our house and the boards that we use for that are all different lengths so that there's no pattern visible in the floor but now we want to use those same boards to lay down a herringbone pattern in our entryway so the first step is modifying these boards to work into that pattern about 200 of them let's do it now I've got a whole bunch of those pieces cut about 200 of them I'm not exactly sure how many I'm gonna need and I won't know that until I start laying them out so I'm going to move on to the next step which is adding a groove to the ends that I cut off as the pieces come they have a tongue on two sides and a groove on the other two sides but when you cut a piece off you lose that groove we don't want to have to worry about left and right pieces so I'm going to go back and put a groove on the sides that were cut so that they can fit together whenever I go to lay them down to do this job I got a slot cutting bit that is the same size as the groove that I'm trying to cut so I'm just going to mount this and then figure out exactly where it needs to be in the router and then go back and cut all of these pieces I've got all the grooves put in all 200 or so of those pieces and it took about an hour it wasn't too bad the next step is to add a micro bevel to all those pieces as well the product that I got for the flooring has a really tiny bevel on all four edges of the top face and when I made those cuts I got rid of the bevel so I'm going to use the router table and run these over a chamfering bit to add a little tiny bevel to each one this makes it so when you but two pieces up against each other you have a nice little V it's just a nice detail now one thing about putting that bevel back on here is that you do lose the finish on that area that's cut off so we will have to come back later on and refinish at least that if not the entire floor the boards are just about ready to start laying down on the floor and since they're gonna sit at a 45 degree angle relative to the walls I needed to make a little jig to start putting them down and keep them at that angle so I took a piece of plywood cut a straight line with the table saw and then I used that cut line as a reference on the miter sled to cut a perpendicular line now that gives me a perfect 90-degree corner and after that I just trimmed it down to get it to the right size and by the right size I mean the same length as the boards I don't know if that's really important but it gives me a point of reference from this point to this point should be the same size as each one of those boards but the big thing here the important part of this is that these two faces are exactly at 90 degrees I'm up here in the entryway where I'm gonna put the floor down I've already prepped the subfloor it's all ready to go I laid down a layer of moisture barrier which is a paper that you overlap to cover the entire floor and then I measure the dimensions of the room I found the center point going this direction and snapped a chalk line from end to end so I've got a center line running down the room now I've also got a perpendicular line running across it doesn't really matter if it's in the center or not but it's running perpendicular to my center line this way so the next step is to lay down the starter piece here and we really just have to make sure that these two diagonal lines are exactly 45 degrees from that center line so having those perpendicular lines in the center will help us do that it's tough to see on camera but the chalk lines are right here and then right here down the center now that we've got this triangle we can put it in place but since I cut this back edge freehand that's not a good reference point we want to use the outside corners against this line and then the central point against that line but you can't actually do it like this this wouldn't work out if this center point is running right down the center of the room once you start putting these boards on put that one there the next one's going to overlap it and so now the center of the room is not running down through the middle of what's going to be a zigzag pattern it's running a little bit offset so we have to adjust the placement of this piece before we start putting anything down it's really simple to do all you do is measure your piece of wood the width of it - three inches now I'm gonna mark over half of that an inch and a half and now that mark is what needs to line up with my centerline in the room so now I have the offset that is half the width of the piece and so when I go to put my pieces on here now the centerline of the room runs right down the middle of this zigzag pattern that's what I want so now I just have to lay down that triangle and get it exactly on the three points driving some screws to hold it in place and then I can start laying the floor now in a point where I've got the first section all the way to the end it's not quite touching the end but it's as far as I can go with full pieces so now I have to turn around and start coming back now the way this works is you take up your original triangle you reattach it along one of the edges of the pieces that you just finished putting down and then you start working this direction with the center section you're actually putting down alternating boards but once you turn around you're doing a single row so now I'm going to put the triangle right here it's got to line up with where this next piece is going to go it is up against a tongue here but it doesn't matter it's still a straight line so I'm going to get it into the right position where the next piece will be for that edge and then just screw it down so now that's ready to start building on the rest of the pieces in the same way just headed up this direction now of course this area and all of this stuff down here at the end is gonna have to get filled in with pieces and that's actually going to be the complicated part I finally made it back to where I started this is where the original triangle was and so I can continue to build on this point and take it all the way to that wall but I can't put the pieces on in the orientation that they are now that would be putting a tongue into this groove there wouldn't be a way to nail it down so we have to flip the pieces around and to do that I cut down some other pieces of this exact same flooring some of the scraps and made some splines that are the same size as the tongues so I can fit these splines inside this groove and then use that as the tongue for the next piece I've got the pattern laid all the way down and now it's at a point where it's running into the transition to this other room and this is stuff I installed a long time ago I've never done this before so I'm honestly just trying to figure out how to make these pieces fit and basically I have to cut each one of them to its final length then add the 45-degree angle to it so that it will fit in here and then of course you have to add the micro bevel to it and cut in any new grooves into that piece that it needs to fit in theoretically at that point it should just drop into place but there's a lot of things working against you one the geometry is kind of weird here it makes it so that you can't just slide a piece in but also there's a tongue on two different sides here so you have to try to slide it on to a tongue in two different directions it's just difficult so what I've found so far is that you have to cut out some of the tongue and trim the bottom of the piece that you're gonna put into place and then basically just use a rubber mallet to smack it down now the danger and forcing a piece in place with a rubber mallet is that it can tear up this transition so if you're going to do that be really careful not to damage what you already have in place pieces like this get really kind of difficult especially as they get smaller so for this one I had to cut off the bottom of the groove here just so they could clear fitting over the tongue that's already there I had to notch out this so it would clear this piece of trim and I had to put a small bevel on the backside so that when you lay it in place it can clear this entire front edge it's really tight but it should be good once I knock it in place now the bad thing with a small triangle like this is I'm going to end up with one really tiny piece right here that piece is either gonna have to be glued down or I'm gonna have to drill a hole through it and face nail it which is not ideal but those are about my only options I got this transition into the room finished and it was a little bit difficult because this cross piece in the doorway was already nailed down so I had a little bit of trouble laying these pieces in place without messing up this outside edge I'm gonna have to do similar stuff on all the other three sides but it should be a little bit easier because this piece won't be down yet let me show you what I mean over here I've got a similar situation because this floor and that room is already in place these boards have to run into that but instead of cutting individual pieces to fit in each one of these gaps I'm going to add a border around the other three sides of this room so by doing that I can actually run a straight line along these 45-degree pieces and cut off all the ends then I can lay in two more boards parallel with that room to fill the gap and since there's a doorway here I'm going to start there so I can figure out how far into the room I need to go and then use that same measurement on the other two walls so I've got a few marks to where I need the cut to be and I've got them every foot or so so I'm lining up the outside edge where the blade is gonna be on this saw with those marks so I'm going to plunge it in from here at the start make that cut and then lift up the entire thing and realign it with the rest of the marks and just try to work my way down a section of the time so I started to make a full depth cut this wood is really hard and it's actually having kind of a hard time getting through it so I think instead I'm gonna make a shallow cut along this line and then leave the track in place and come back and make the final cut to get all the way through it that was super nerve-racking but I did get all of those long cuts done had to adjust a little bit along the way but I'm pretty happy with how they turned out so the last thing to do before I can start fitting in those long pieces is to cut out the corners where the saw couldn't make it all the way to the end of the run and to do that I'm going to use a circular saw and just freehand it luckily these are pretty short cuts usually less than three or four inches so should be alright we finally got everything cut so the last stage before laying down those boards is to put that micro bevel that I've been putting on the pieces all along along this long cut edge and to do that and move the chamfering bit into a palm router it's got a bearing on it so we can just set it on here and run it down the line at this point I've got essentially two rows of material to put down all the way around and I'm gonna have to lay them like this which means that have a groove here so there's nothing to hold this piece to the existing herringbone floor so one more pass all the way around with the groove bit that I use to cut the groove on the end of all these pieces to add a groove all the way around and make another huge mess I finally made it all the way around the room with the last full row and now I've got to fill in the last gap up against the wall if you've seen my flooring videos in the past you know that you have to rip down a small strip to fill that gap but you also have to leave a little bit of room for expansion usually about 3/8 of an inch so rip this piece down and it's going to be faced nailed down into place now the easiest way to get this into place is to take off the bottom of the groove so you don't have to hook it around the tongue you can just drop it straight down so now I've got these pieces I'm gonna drop them straight down drill some holes in the top and then the drive in the nails a lot of people don't like to put quarter-round on top of their wood in our house we have it everywhere so I'm going to use quarter round to go on top and fill this gap up against the wall that'll do two things it covers the expansion gap but it also probably will cover some of the nail holes and really the rest of this is just like doing a normal floor you have to cut very specific pieces to fit around doorways and to fit underneath the trim and it's just a matter of getting the order of operations so that you can drop all the pieces into the right place all right I'm gonna finish this up and then we'll be done now one of the last things to do here and I'm not going to do it on camera because I ran out of time is to add some polyurethane to all of these cut edges you can see here where we added the new bevel that it got rid of the polyurethane it's a little bit lighter and so the way to fix that is to go back and just put another coat now you could recut the entire floor or you could just paint on a couple of coats within those cracks I'm gonna test it and see which one actually takes more time it may take less time to just do the whole floor again so here it is it's all complete and I'm very very happy to have it done it was a huge amount of work but I really like the way it looks and it actually turned out to look a lot nicer than I expected all the angles fit together really well they run nicely up against the outer frame so I call it a win this was a whole lot of work to do for just a small room but there are some products you can buy specifically made for herringbone they have it already cut to length already grooved already beveled so you can just lay it down in the pattern and that would save you a huge amount of time now I would probably not do this pattern in a very large room but as an entryway as a highlight I think it works great one thing I'm not sure about this pattern though and I'm not seeing anybody else have trouble with this is about expansion and contraction of this section since its captive within a frame usually you put that expansion gap around the outside of the walls so I'm not sure how this will do I guess we'll find out I'd love to know what you think about this one you can let me know down in the comments I've got tons of other projects of all different types that you may be interested in check some of those out right there and don't forget to subscribe that's it for this one guys thanks for watching see you next time I marked the center points across and then I did drop snapped pattern with any flooring it really just depends it's already cut to length it already has bevels it already has get a good good good groupshey I'm Bob and I like to make stuff today we're gonna lay down a herringbone floor in the past you've seen me lay down hardwood flooring in our house and the boards that we use for that are all different lengths so that there's no pattern visible in the floor but now we want to use those same boards to lay down a herringbone pattern in our entryway so the first step is modifying these boards to work into that pattern about 200 of them let's do it now I've got a whole bunch of those pieces cut about 200 of them I'm not exactly sure how many I'm gonna need and I won't know that until I start laying them out so I'm going to move on to the next step which is adding a groove to the ends that I cut off as the pieces come they have a tongue on two sides and a groove on the other two sides but when you cut a piece off you lose that groove we don't want to have to worry about left and right pieces so I'm going to go back and put a groove on the sides that were cut so that they can fit together whenever I go to lay them down to do this job I got a slot cutting bit that is the same size as the groove that I'm trying to cut so I'm just going to mount this and then figure out exactly where it needs to be in the router and then go back and cut all of these pieces I've got all the grooves put in all 200 or so of those pieces and it took about an hour it wasn't too bad the next step is to add a micro bevel to all those pieces as well the product that I got for the flooring has a really tiny bevel on all four edges of the top face and when I made those cuts I got rid of the bevel so I'm going to use the router table and run these over a chamfering bit to add a little tiny bevel to each one this makes it so when you but two pieces up against each other you have a nice little V it's just a nice detail now one thing about putting that bevel back on here is that you do lose the finish on that area that's cut off so we will have to come back later on and refinish at least that if not the entire floor the boards are just about ready to start laying down on the floor and since they're gonna sit at a 45 degree angle relative to the walls I needed to make a little jig to start putting them down and keep them at that angle so I took a piece of plywood cut a straight line with the table saw and then I used that cut line as a reference on the miter sled to cut a perpendicular line now that gives me a perfect 90-degree corner and after that I just trimmed it down to get it to the right size and by the right size I mean the same length as the boards I don't know if that's really important but it gives me a point of reference from this point to this point should be the same size as each one of those boards but the big thing here the important part of this is that these two faces are exactly at 90 degrees I'm up here in the entryway where I'm gonna put the floor down I've already prepped the subfloor it's all ready to go I laid down a layer of moisture barrier which is a paper that you overlap to cover the entire floor and then I measure the dimensions of the room I found the center point going this direction and snapped a chalk line from end to end so I've got a center line running down the room now I've also got a perpendicular line running across it doesn't really matter if it's in the center or not but it's running perpendicular to my center line this way so the next step is to lay down the starter piece here and we really just have to make sure that these two diagonal lines are exactly 45 degrees from that center line so having those perpendicular lines in the center will help us do that it's tough to see on camera but the chalk lines are right here and then right here down the center now that we've got this triangle we can put it in place but since I cut this back edge freehand that's not a good reference point we want to use the outside corners against this line and then the central point against that line but you can't actually do it like this this wouldn't work out if this center point is running right down the center of the room once you start putting these boards on put that one there the next one's going to overlap it and so now the center of the room is not running down through the middle of what's going to be a zigzag pattern it's running a little bit offset so we have to adjust the placement of this piece before we start putting anything down it's really simple to do all you do is measure your piece of wood the width of it - three inches now I'm gonna mark over half of that an inch and a half and now that mark is what needs to line up with my centerline in the room so now I have the offset that is half the width of the piece and so when I go to put my pieces on here now the centerline of the room runs right down the middle of this zigzag pattern that's what I want so now I just have to lay down that triangle and get it exactly on the three points driving some screws to hold it in place and then I can start laying the floor now in a point where I've got the first section all the way to the end it's not quite touching the end but it's as far as I can go with full pieces so now I have to turn around and start coming back now the way this works is you take up your original triangle you reattach it along one of the edges of the pieces that you just finished putting down and then you start working this direction with the center section you're actually putting down alternating boards but once you turn around you're doing a single row so now I'm going to put the triangle right here it's got to line up with where this next piece is going to go it is up against a tongue here but it doesn't matter it's still a straight line so I'm going to get it into the right position where the next piece will be for that edge and then just screw it down so now that's ready to start building on the rest of the pieces in the same way just headed up this direction now of course this area and all of this stuff down here at the end is gonna have to get filled in with pieces and that's actually going to be the complicated part I finally made it back to where I started this is where the original triangle was and so I can continue to build on this point and take it all the way to that wall but I can't put the pieces on in the orientation that they are now that would be putting a tongue into this groove there wouldn't be a way to nail it down so we have to flip the pieces around and to do that I cut down some other pieces of this exact same flooring some of the scraps and made some splines that are the same size as the tongues so I can fit these splines inside this groove and then use that as the tongue for the next piece I've got the pattern laid all the way down and now it's at a point where it's running into the transition to this other room and this is stuff I installed a long time ago I've never done this before so I'm honestly just trying to figure out how to make these pieces fit and basically I have to cut each one of them to its final length then add the 45-degree angle to it so that it will fit in here and then of course you have to add the micro bevel to it and cut in any new grooves into that piece that it needs to fit in theoretically at that point it should just drop into place but there's a lot of things working against you one the geometry is kind of weird here it makes it so that you can't just slide a piece in but also there's a tongue on two different sides here so you have to try to slide it on to a tongue in two different directions it's just difficult so what I've found so far is that you have to cut out some of the tongue and trim the bottom of the piece that you're gonna put into place and then basically just use a rubber mallet to smack it down now the danger and forcing a piece in place with a rubber mallet is that it can tear up this transition so if you're going to do that be really careful not to damage what you already have in place pieces like this get really kind of difficult especially as they get smaller so for this one I had to cut off the bottom of the groove here just so they could clear fitting over the tongue that's already there I had to notch out this so it would clear this piece of trim and I had to put a small bevel on the backside so that when you lay it in place it can clear this entire front edge it's really tight but it should be good once I knock it in place now the bad thing with a small triangle like this is I'm going to end up with one really tiny piece right here that piece is either gonna have to be glued down or I'm gonna have to drill a hole through it and face nail it which is not ideal but those are about my only options I got this transition into the room finished and it was a little bit difficult because this cross piece in the doorway was already nailed down so I had a little bit of trouble laying these pieces in place without messing up this outside edge I'm gonna have to do similar stuff on all the other three sides but it should be a little bit easier because this piece won't be down yet let me show you what I mean over here I've got a similar situation because this floor and that room is already in place these boards have to run into that but instead of cutting individual pieces to fit in each one of these gaps I'm going to add a border around the other three sides of this room so by doing that I can actually run a straight line along these 45-degree pieces and cut off all the ends then I can lay in two more boards parallel with that room to fill the gap and since there's a doorway here I'm going to start there so I can figure out how far into the room I need to go and then use that same measurement on the other two walls so I've got a few marks to where I need the cut to be and I've got them every foot or so so I'm lining up the outside edge where the blade is gonna be on this saw with those marks so I'm going to plunge it in from here at the start make that cut and then lift up the entire thing and realign it with the rest of the marks and just try to work my way down a section of the time so I started to make a full depth cut this wood is really hard and it's actually having kind of a hard time getting through it so I think instead I'm gonna make a shallow cut along this line and then leave the track in place and come back and make the final cut to get all the way through it that was super nerve-racking but I did get all of those long cuts done had to adjust a little bit along the way but I'm pretty happy with how they turned out so the last thing to do before I can start fitting in those long pieces is to cut out the corners where the saw couldn't make it all the way to the end of the run and to do that I'm going to use a circular saw and just freehand it luckily these are pretty short cuts usually less than three or four inches so should be alright we finally got everything cut so the last stage before laying down those boards is to put that micro bevel that I've been putting on the pieces all along along this long cut edge and to do that and move the chamfering bit into a palm router it's got a bearing on it so we can just set it on here and run it down the line at this point I've got essentially two rows of material to put down all the way around and I'm gonna have to lay them like this which means that have a groove here so there's nothing to hold this piece to the existing herringbone floor so one more pass all the way around with the groove bit that I use to cut the groove on the end of all these pieces to add a groove all the way around and make another huge mess I finally made it all the way around the room with the last full row and now I've got to fill in the last gap up against the wall if you've seen my flooring videos in the past you know that you have to rip down a small strip to fill that gap but you also have to leave a little bit of room for expansion usually about 3/8 of an inch so rip this piece down and it's going to be faced nailed down into place now the easiest way to get this into place is to take off the bottom of the groove so you don't have to hook it around the tongue you can just drop it straight down so now I've got these pieces I'm gonna drop them straight down drill some holes in the top and then the drive in the nails a lot of people don't like to put quarter-round on top of their wood in our house we have it everywhere so I'm going to use quarter round to go on top and fill this gap up against the wall that'll do two things it covers the expansion gap but it also probably will cover some of the nail holes and really the rest of this is just like doing a normal floor you have to cut very specific pieces to fit around doorways and to fit underneath the trim and it's just a matter of getting the order of operations so that you can drop all the pieces into the right place all right I'm gonna finish this up and then we'll be done now one of the last things to do here and I'm not going to do it on camera because I ran out of time is to add some polyurethane to all of these cut edges you can see here where we added the new bevel that it got rid of the polyurethane it's a little bit lighter and so the way to fix that is to go back and just put another coat now you could recut the entire floor or you could just paint on a couple of coats within those cracks I'm gonna test it and see which one actually takes more time it may take less time to just do the whole floor again so here it is it's all complete and I'm very very happy to have it done it was a huge amount of work but I really like the way it looks and it actually turned out to look a lot nicer than I expected all the angles fit together really well they run nicely up against the outer frame so I call it a win this was a whole lot of work to do for just a small room but there are some products you can buy specifically made for herringbone they have it already cut to length already grooved already beveled so you can just lay it down in the pattern and that would save you a huge amount of time now I would probably not do this pattern in a very large room but as an entryway as a highlight I think it works great one thing I'm not sure about this pattern though and I'm not seeing anybody else have trouble with this is about expansion and contraction of this section since its captive within a frame usually you put that expansion gap around the outside of the walls so I'm not sure how this will do I guess we'll find out I'd love to know what you think about this one you can let me know down in the comments I've got tons of other projects of all different types that you may be interested in check some of those out right there and don't forget to subscribe that's it for this one guys thanks for watching see you next time I marked the center points across and then I did drop snapped pattern with any flooring it really just depends it's already cut to length it already has bevels it already has get a good good good groups\n"