[AGL] putting in a wood floor

[Michael Eisenstadt]

i am slowly S L O W L Y putting in a wood floor
in our 1 bedroom condo apt.

this is a snap together wood product cheap from
Costco which has a sale on it 2x a year. C H E E P
real C H E E P: about $1.25 a square foot.

this is usually installed floating. it looks good 
but except for the perimeter it is not really
secured to the floor. To walk on it spoils 
the eye candy of what seems to be maple
flooring as you bounce up and down
slightly. 

So I am fastening it to the featherweight
concrete below the cheap wall-to-wall carpet.
there is a pad between the carpet and the 
concrete. this makes the visual effect a 
bit odd as there will be lots of steel washers
set flush into the 5/16" thick wood product.

The maple grain is actually a photograph
embedded in a very thin plastic ply on 
top of the wood product. There is also 
another ply on the backside of the 
wood product, a brown antislip dappled
plastic. 

above the 1 1/4" outside diameter of the
washer is a 1" fender washer with a
countersunk fastener in its hole. the puzzle
as to what would be the best fastener into
this sort of concrete, the answer has seemed 
to be ordinary sheetrock self-tapping screws, 
long skinny black sheetrock screws.

the 1" fender washer is 1/16" proud of the
floor but you can hardly feel it when 
standing on it with your bare feet. 

i soaked a piece of this in water for a 
week, the wood product part of it did
not swell as far as i could see. 

name withheld by administrator