Some Things Are Just Too Easy.
Five years ago, Toni and i replaced the worn-out carpet in our house with tile and wood. Toni’s brothers came out from Florida and laid the tile, but she and I did the wood ourselves. It was a bear to do: We pulled the carpet; then we pulled the pad, then we scraped off the glue; then we had to soak the floor to loosen the paint overspray from when the house was built – and all that was prep for laying the new floor!
We glued the wood strips (prefinished Australian cypress) directly to the concrete slab, because we weren’t worried about moisture coming from the Arizona dirt under the house. That meant we had to pour the glue, spread the glue, lay the strips in the glue, position the strips before the glue set, and then strap them together so they didn’t move while the glue cured. After that, we had to clean up the excess glue, roll the strips with a weighted roller to make *sure* they were in the glue, and clean up the new excess glue. And, of course, we had to clean the glue off our tools and ourselves every night when we were done for the day.
(Side note: I finally got the last tidbits of glue off the floors THIS YEAR.)
By contrast, to replace the peel-and-stick tile in Rick and Eve’s kitchen with acacia hardwood flooring, we steamed the old tiles off, unrolled some underlayment and stapled it down, laid down the flooring strips, whacked them with a compressed-air-powered flooring nail gun, and PRESTO! Half the floor done in one day. No glue, no cleanup, no horrendous mess, almost no nothing except a beautiful hardwood floor.
[I do have to qualify this a bit, though. The nail gun can’t get close to the walls, so the initial row and the final two or three rows will have to be nailed manually. That’ll be a pain because the acacia is so hard that we have to drill pilot holes before nailing the strips down. But still. You nail the strip down and you’re done. No waiting for the glue to cure, no residual sticky mess to clean up, and no requirement to work past when you want to quit because there’s still glue on the floor that has to be used before it dries and cures.]
Like I said, some things are just too easy.
The Peripatetic Traveler 
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