In theory (bah!), the outside wall on the addition, which is essentially the face of the house, should be the straightest part of the house. So, coming out of the hallway into the next bedroom, and because I have to use the nailer on the tongue side of the boards, not the groove side, I had to start at the back wall and meet the hallway. Now, I don't know that I couldn't have tried using the groove side, but I don't think the nailer would work as effectively, and I probably would've spent a lot of time digging half-pressed nails and broken wood out of the planks, ultimately to not have them as secure to the floor. That being said, I probably should have at least tried.
So measuring off the wall the same distance as the office should work just the same, right? Wrong. Had I ended up being slightly long on it, it would have been fine, and I could've just ripped a row. But no. My luck has me 1/4" short.
I cursed it. Then myself. Beat myself up over it for an entire day. Couldn't get over it. I finally had to just decide that there was nothing I could do, except accept that I'd screwed up and fix it by ripping along the doorway on an angle and sticking some t-moulding in there. No one but me (and you, the reader) will ever notice that there's one here but not in the other three doorways.
UPDATE: When going between rooms, where you're starting at a doorway, you should use SPLINE (bottom of this page) to change the direction of the tongue, and allowing you to go toward the wall instead of trying to meet up with an existing row. Wish I would have read this earlier!
So I set up the miter saw to the right angle and ripped all the boards along that doorway, making sure that all boards were long enough to have at least 6-8" on the other side to start rows with, so I'm not wasting wood.
All in all, I think it will be a fine resolve, and it meant we got the spare room done, and the hallway done. We now have just 2 more rooms to go!
In other flooring news, I saw a sweet pic on Pinterest that got me thinking about reusing the laminate we pulled up for a wall covering in the studio. So I started that project yesterday, thinking I could maybe get it done quickly...but the dude glued some of the boards together, so the small click-together parts on some of them are a little messed up.
To fix that, I just took a hand saw (miter saw, with the angled handle and straight blade) to the groove, and shaved away the composite wood. Pretty simple. It's gonna look really great when it's all done!
Onward.
