When you have laid all the planks, you can fit the beading around the edges of the room. Beading is usually available in the same colour as the floor you have chosen and simply needs to be tacked into place to the skirting. The beading provides a nice finish to the floor as well as hiding the expansion gap.

Next you have to fit the room threshold. Thresholds can also be bought in the same type of wood as your floor covering or in aluminium or brass types. The threshold differentiates where the floor ends and is usually fitted at doorways. If you have different types of floor coverings in the room, you can also buy thresholds that are really long in length so can divide a room perfectly.

We have talked a lot about finding the right type of wooden flooring and leaving it to acclimatise, be we have said little about fitting a wooden floor over the last three articles. In this article we will discuss fitting a wooden floor over a concrete subfloor.

When you fit a wooden floor over a concrete subfloor you need to make sure you use a damp proof membrane between the floor and the subfloor. If you don’t, damp will rise into the wood from the concrete and cause buckling and warping. After installing the damp proof membrane you can lay the underlay and then start to lay your wooden floor.

If you are using click flooring, the planks will go down easily, you just need to make sure you leave an expansion gap so the floor can float.

When you have decided on a type of wooden flooring and have had the flooring delivered to your home, it’s imperative that the flooring is left in the room where it will be fitted for a minimum of 48 hours. This is called acclimatising the flooring.

Wooden flooring will have been kept in completely different conditions to the conditions in your home. The temperature and the humidity in the warehouse where the flooring has been stored may make the flooring contract or expand when it warms up. If you fit the flooring before you leave time for this to happen to the individual planks, the floor may buckle or warp when fitted and hence your newly fitted floor will be ruined.

In the last article we gave you some information on the different types of wooden floor. In this article we will discuss different fitting methods.

Floating floors

Floating wooden floors are not fixed to the subfloor and as such ‘float’ on the underlay you have used. The reason a floor is left floating is because is it will expand or contract as necessary due to changes in temperature or humidity. Floating floors are easy to fit and if you are competent at DIY you can do the job yourself.

Tongue and groove

Some wooden floors fit together using the tongue and groove method. One side of the plank has a tongue and the other a groove. The tongue is glued into the grove of the adjacent plank creating a solid floor surface.

Click flooring

Click flooring doesn’t use adhesive, the floor just clicks together using an ingenious rebate along the edge of the planks. Click wooden floor is one of the easiest types of flooring to fit.

If you have decided to fit a wooden flooring one of the rooms in your home you will first need to be aware of a few things before you decide on the type of wood. Are you looking for a safety flooring?

Solid wooden flooring

Solid wooden flooring is as the name suggests made out of solid pieces of wood. It is great to use in any room except the bathroom and with new types available that can be ‘clicked’ together, fitting is easy too.

Engineered wooden flooring

Engineered wooden flooring uses a layer of real wood on top of a substrate of wood composites. This makes the flooring more structurally stable than other types of wooden floor so it can be used where there are rapid changes of temperature in the room such as the conservatory.