Section 2: Top Floor

Creating pilot holes in hardwood floor

This lesson is for when you have marked your floor and you are ready to drill pilot holes into the wood floor or subfloor. If you do not have a wood floor or subfloor, you should proceed to Lesson 2-5: Drilling Pilot Holes in Concrete (or unknown subfloor). If you are in the right place, let's look at the special tools you will need for drilling pilot holes into a wood floor or subfloor.

Tools needed:

• 1 Prepare Your HAVEN
  

  At this point, you should have marked the four drill holes from the install template on your floor.

  Take your HAVEN and unscrew the gate. You do this by unscrewing the four screws on the front of the gate as seen here.

  Once you have removed the gate cover, place the HAVEN unit down on the floor so that it matches up each one of the four holes. If it doesn’t match. STOP. Go back to the template and make sure you correctly marked the floor. All 6 marks should align with the four holes in HAVEN. Once they align, you can proceed.

  Double check to make sure everything seems right. Will HAVEN be low enough for the door to clear it when it is unlocked. Will HAVEN be high enough so that at least .25 inches of HAVEN will be touching the bottom of the door. This is gut check time. Be comfortable with HAVEN where it is right now since once you start drilling, there is not really any going back.

  Everything is lined up right? Now we need to do it again while putting masking tape down.
• 2 Drill Pilot Holes

  Now you are ready to drill. Remove the HAVEN from the floor. You have 6 targets marked on the floor for drilling. Pick one and get your drill and drill bit ready. Take your time. You only get once chance to get each hole right. Slow and steady wins the race.

  

  Take your drill and very slowly start to make a pilot hole with your 1⁄8 Inch High-Speed Steel drill bit. You need to make a pilot hole that is two inches deep into your wood floor. If you are drilling through carpet, vinyl, or any other surface into a wood subfloor. You need to account for the extra layers of flooring. Make sure your pilot hole is at least an inch into the subfloor. You are going to have to do some guess work here. Mark your drill bit at two inches and use that as a guide to mark you are going deep enough into your floor or subfloor.

  Once you have made at least a 2 inch pilot hole in each marked hole. Clean up any debris that is visible with a vacuum cleaner. You want to make sure the area is clean before you screw down HAVEN in place.

  Proceed to Lesson 3-2: Securing HAVEN into a Hardwood Floor or Subfloor