Checkerboard Parquet Flooring

It’s been awhile, but I can finally report that the flooring conundrum has been solved! We found some beautiful oak parquet that came in a variety of colors.

Unfortunately when we tried to order samples we found out that Armstrong Flooring was going through a change in distributors and samples weren’t available at the moment. I tried ordering from three online stores and several local stores and no one was able to get samples. So we hunted again and found that Bruce Flooring makes a very similar product, and the colors aren’t very different either. I wanted a checkerboard pattern, but I didn’t want a stark contrast like the black and white floors of old world grand ballrooms. I wanted a subtle pattern of two different shades of dark brown. A little bit of contrast, but overall just a nice dark brown oak floor.

We started by putting down an underlayment because the parquet wasn’t as thick as the wood tiles would have been.

This involved a fancy new tool (which Marcus loves) to put in screws every four inches around the edges of the boards and every six inches in the middle.

This meant about 2500 screws in the great room alone. Thank goodness they come on this strips that look like weird ammo belts. It would have taken forever otherwise.

We nailed a big board down in the center of the room so that the first row of tiles (I guess technically parquet squares can be classified as tiles) would stay straight. After the first day’s part was dry, it would hold the rest in place and keep them from sliding out of line.

Except that the second day we started from the wall so no one would get boxed in without an exit- it’s best not to walk on the tiles for at least a day because it shifts the angles and causes glue to squish up from the seams. And it turns out that the wall wasn’t straight. Which we didn’t notice until we had laid about 40 square feet and they started to not line up quite right.

So we had to pull all those new ones out and move them to another part of the room and scrape up all the glue where they had been. This is hard because each square foot is made up of four 6”x6” pieces that don’t always stay together when you are pulling it up from the glue. If they came apart (so just came out of the box that way) the old glue had to be chipped off with a knife so that the tongue and groove system would still work.

These tiles are made of several narrow pieces of wood with a wire running through them to hold them together. They are not real easy to cut to fit against walls, but if you have a ninety degree angle it’s not so bad. If you have weird angles, like this room, it’s a lot harder. We had to tape the pieces before we cut them so all the bits wouldn’t fall apart.

It took us one day to put down the underlayment and about three days (after we abandoned day two, dubbed “disaster day”) to lay the parquet. But now the great room floor is done and it looks great! I’m so pleased with the way it turned out. Allie pointed out that it just seems to go with the house so much better than the end grain tiles would have. They were a little rustic, and with the giant chandelier that I found at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, a more refined look was needed.