Flooring Installation , How to fit Laminate Flooring

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Well this is how to install Laminate flooring. There are many images on this page so please allow the page to fully load.

Flooring Underlay

Begin by clearing the room, of all furniture floor coverings, and give it a good sweep. Remove all carpet grippers ( grip strips ) and any nails.
We lay our underlay the full length of the room, and we start on the longest wall, generally opposite the entrance door to the room. When installing flooring as shown below, try to work on one piece of underlay at a time.

Hall floor prior to new flooring being installed. Remove all grippers, and carpet tacks (nails ) also try to ensure no cables, whatsoever are under the new flooring, if absolutely necessary, run the cables around the perimeter of the room. To be hidden within the expansion gap, by expansion profile.
The lounge floor in this case, was quite long and wide. Quite a few obstructions, and abutments, which is fine. Breaksthe monotony. We have decided 9in this situation to lay the flooring, in the direction of sunlight, ie towards the windows. This allows for the flooring to match the direction of the hall flooring, so as to give the impression of more space within such a small area, such as the hall.
The carpet is to be discarded, so we run a knife the full length down the middle, and also across the room, splitting this large carpet into several smaller manageable sections.

 Many times when installing a new floor in for example your lounge, you may also want to lay the flooring in the hall also. Commonly, the hall floor opens into the lounge floor. It would be nice to install the flooring as ONE complete floor, but we would strongly suggest you don't. Many problems, with laminate floating floors, occur when the floor is installed in multiple rooms, without adequate expansion gaps. We would suggest you treat the 2 floors separately, and run them in the same direction.

This particular flooring installation, is pretty easy. Albeit there are some wiring issues. Halls can take as long if not longer to install than huge lounge floors, purely because of room, and number of doorways. As a rule of thumb, when installing a Hall floor, remove all doors first. Then pre cut all architraves, and you are ready to begin laying.

The lounge floor in this case has a common issue, a "stickyout bit" , abutment, old chimney breast etc. Most houses have them, and this one is no exception. Rather than make your life hard, when installing the floor. Think logically, what is easiest usually is easiest. We lay the underlay full length of the room, and then install 2 - 3 rows of flooring. Straight laying, from one end of the room, to the other. We then position this flooring, upto the abutment ( chimney breast ) and measure back to the long wall. If this distance is WIDER than 1 plank , then we need to mark the planks, directly in front of the chimney breas, to remove material, so as to enable a full plank fit into the main wall.

Its quite complicated, to explain , easier to do. See figs below:

The result speaks for itself, easy and clean looking. perfectly fitted, and just a little knowhow. The hardest job, well for now is over. Lets get laying the main flooring. What we call the meat of the job.

Terminology Used in flooring ( our terminology anyway )

Scribe : marking a piece of flooring, to be cut, and to fit perfectly.
BackLay : when we fit flooring, as above, and then fill in the small area, where logically you would have thought would be installed first.
Head Joint : this is the narrow part of the plank, the end(s) .

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