• Wood flooring requires careful planning to make it fit correctly.wood image by Zbigniew Nowak from Fotolia.com
  
  Laying a wood floor is one of the most transformative things you can do to a room, and has one of the most dramatic effects on the value of the home. The process of laying the floor is fairly intuitive, with the tongue and groove fittings along the sides holding the boards together, and nails or flooring staples securing it to the subfloor. However, the process does get a little complicated when you are trying to determine how exactly the floor will fit in your room. Some careful planning will help you avoid these complications.
  
  

Square Footage and Acclimation

• Determining how many square feet of flooring you need is more complicated with a wood floor than it is with a square tile floor, because the wood floor comes in long planks that aren't easily translated into square footage. Most flooring kits will tell you how many boards per square feet you need, but that's not the end of the calculation. You also have to consider that there will be waste at the edges when you cut boards. Add about 10 percent to the square footage you need when laying a standard straight-course floor, and add about 20 percent if you're laying the boards diagonally. Once the flooring arrives, let it sit for a week or two in the room before you install it, to allow it to acclimate to the environment, so it will not expand or contract as much after you install it.
  
  

Determining the Starting and Ending Widths

• It is unlikely your floor courses are going to fit exactly as you need them, side-by-side across the width of the floor, without having to cut the final course. If the final course is going to be narrower than about 2 inches, you should split the difference between the first and last courses, so there are no overly thin boards. Measure the width of the floor starting half an inch out from each opposing wall (because you have to leave space around the perimeter of the floor at the walls on all sides to allow for wood expansion). Divide the width of the room by the width of a floorboard to determine how many full floorboards will fit, and how much room will be left at the end. Add that leftover space to the width of the board, then divide by two. For example, if you have 1 inch of space left over, and your boards are 4 inches wide, that's 5 inches, divided by two, or 2 1/2 inches, which is how wide you should cut your starting and ending courses.
  
  

Staggering the Courses

• Floors are stronger and look better if the ends of the boards do not line up with one another between courses. This is why it's important to stagger the boards as you lay the floor. This usually isn't difficult, since most flooring kits come with boards in several different lengths to accommodate staggering. If not, start each course of flooring at the opposite end as the previous course, with a board that is cut to a different length than the one next to it.