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Prepare Plywood for Plank FlooringRecently, we saw some great pins on Pinterest.com about using plywood to install farmhouse style, rustic plank flooring in your home. We love this idea, and after 20 years of installing laminate flooring in every room (sometimes more than once!), we are ready for something new and interesting. We created a video to show you how we prepared our plywood to be used for this purpose.

Many of you may recall that we bought a home in Florida and moved South for a time. Well, we decided we didn’t love it there and missed the sweet little cottage we’ve built out of our 1995 double wide manufactured home up North. So, we sold our Florida home and returned to our former house, which we never sold, but had intended to rent.

Upon our return, we realized that our new king size bed would not fit in our former master bedroom. So, what did we do? We knocked a wall out between the two smaller bedrooms and decided to build a suite! We’re crazy like that sometimes :-).

We’ll share this project as we move through it, but here’s the gist of what we have planned:

  • Plywood plank flooring
  • Ship lap walls
  • Bi-fold 36″ french door (to accommodate us when we are older and potentially needing wider doors)
  • Wall of shelving in between to partially separate the rooms and provide closet space
  • Barn doors to cover the opening between room sections
  • Ceiling undecided (Got any ideas? Please share in the comments!)

Our first installment is the preparation of the plywood for the flooring. While we’ve seen many blog posts about how to lay the floor, like this terrific one from LittleGreenNotebook.com, we haven’t seen any video showing how to go about cutting the wood yourself. Many blog posts suggest Home Depot will do this for you. We inquired about that, but they would only do a few cuts free of charge and we needed 88 cuts…for starters. They would do it for .50 per cut but why add $44 more to a project when you don’t have to?

For our flooring, we chose plywood that was smoother on one side in 4’x8′ sheets at 15/32 thickness. (Thank you to reader Michelle for reminding me to include this! :-)

This video demonstration shows how we set up the saw, how we worked together, the sanding process, the time it took, and how much flooring we got in the amount of time we spent. We hope you will find it useful.

We’re hoping to make a decision about color and finish for the flooring next. While we love the light color of the floor in LittleGreenNotebook.com post (and I’m loving it again now that I’ve popped over and looked at it once more!), we also love what Centsationalgirl has goin’ on with her floors. We think a light floor with all of the light walls and ceiling might me overkill.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below. We’d love to have you’re input!

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Enjoy…