When we purchased our house I gave my muscle man one condition, I wanted to rip up the carpet in the living room and dining room and put in hardwood floors. Since we got such a good deal on the house, it made it easy to be able to afford the floors, but we're still cheap so we decided that paying for labor just wasn't worth it, and we wanted to give it a try ourselves (I speak for myself here, I think my hubby wanted to call the pros haha!) We settled on bamboo, partly because my muscle man likes the look, partly because we got an amazing deal on them, and partly because bamboo gave us the best combination of being slightly better with moisture (important in such a humid state!) and still being a real wood and not a laminate. Plus the bright caramel color of the bamboo is just so dreamy! I originally wanted something dark, but I can make do =D So once we finally got all the nasty old carpet up, we were ready to get started on the floors! My parents came down for the weekend to help us out, we couldn't have done things without their help!!
First up was sanding and laying the underlayment, no photos of the sanding since my muscle man did most of that while I was gone (thankfully, I would have freaked out had I known how much dust he was kicking around with that sander had I been home!! But since I walked in and the damage was already done, there was no sense arguing about what could have been done to prevent dust from going everywhere =P) We read the instructions on the underlayment paper and were kinda confused that it didn't mention stapling it down except at one end, so we put a few down each strip and at the opposite ends so that the paper would stay in place... (Of course, halfway through the project we realized why they didn't advise stapling, the paper moved under the floors and we had to pull the staples up to avoid bumps and lumps in the paper)
The next morning we woke up and got started working, we had determined the room was square already and picked the best spot to start, and with a few measurements the first couple of pieces were down! Just measure, lock into the piece before it, and nail it down! Rinse, repeat, ad nauseum =P
At first there wasn't much for me to do, so I got some shots of my muscle man and dad cutting the planks outside on the porch. We really lucked up in being able to have a spot so close to where we were working to, it really made things super simple to just step outside each time we needed a cut (which is really often, especially with 3 people working, we got to the end of each row pretty quickly!)
My muscle man looks so good nailing down the floors! I told him to put some shoes on, but he was so ready to get the floors down that he didn't much care... At least he did wear some hearing protection, and eye protection when he was using the saw... Guess that's as much as I can ask for from a hard headed man hell bent on getting our floors laid!
We got insanely lucky with our measurements, we were dreading coming to the columns we have in the middle of the living room. But it turned out that the floor fit perfectly around the columns, no cutting needed! (well aside from the ends, but no jig saw cuts needed on the length of the boards) What fabulous luck! 
We managed to finish the weekend with the floors mostly done (still gotta do the transitions and the quarter-round molding) and there was one member of the family that couldn't have been happier... the poor dog! He was terrified all weekend, he doesn't do loud noises well, so the sound of the nail gun going off so frequently really scared him... He spent most of the weekend shaking and hiding under the nightstand, but I managed to pull him out once we were nearly through for some comforting and bravery training (we weren't nailing when I pulled him out, but he was so scared he didn't want to leave the bedroom, so I made him come out and sniff around while everyone was taking a break)
And now that we own the power tools needed to put in floors, we may do some more projects around the house as well... but for now we are just kicking back and enjoying our fabulous new living/dining room!! =D
(video posted previously on the blog over here: (link))
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