Part five is the last in the series of our ‘before you lay your wood floor’ posts. Now that you have your room ready and your flooring prepared to lay, now all you need to do is decide on your fitting method.
Overall, there are a few wood floor laying options. These include secret nailing, gluing or even having a floating floor. However, the sub-floor you are laying your wood on and the type of wood you have chosen (engineered or solid wood) have a huge impact on what options are suitable for you. See our flowchart below to see what fitting method is suitable for you.
Tip 1:
If you are secret nailing your floor to a wood subfloor, we advise you to lay underlay between the subfloor and new floor.
Tip 2:
When laying your wood floor over a concrete subfloor, a DPM barrier (Damp Proof Membrane) between the concrete and the wood floor prevents any the subfloor soaking up moisture. The DPM can be in the form of a liquid if you are gluing the floor down (suitable for solid and engineered) or in the form of an underlay with an inbuilt DPM barrier if you are laying the floor as a floating floor (suitable for engineered wood only). If you are using an underlay with inbuilt DPM, ensure that the edges of the underlay overlap and taped together to avoid any gaps, extending up the walls by about an inch.
Tip 3:
If you have a wooden sub-floor with pipes running underneath figure out if you will need to get to these pipes in the future when considering your fitting method.
Now that you have looked at the available fitting options and have chosen your method to fit your wood floor it is time to go ahead and fit it! Before you do, why not have another read over the previous four posts 1, 2, 3 & 4 from the series to refresh your mind.
Keep an eye out for posts on how to fit your wood floor where we will discuss these fitting methods in more detail.
Remember, in the last post, How to acclimatise your wood floor, we advised you to re-check the moisture level of your subfloor to ensure it is below 12% and to check whether the acclimatised wood floor boards are within 2-4% of the subfloor moisture content - This should be done just before you are going to lay your floor to make sure the conditions are suitable!
