Wooden Flooring

Unlike fitted carpets that look shabby after a few years of family life, wooden flooring gains 'character' and 'patina'. However it does have to be carefully laid and maintained. Phil gives us some tips.

Solid, Layered or Laminated?

Wooden floors are not all created equal. In older buildings solid floor boards were laid across the joists to create the floor. In very old, or smarter than average, houses these were hardwood – usually oak in the UK. In more recent or cheaper houses they were softwood and intended to be covered, the wood is not particularly attractive and nor is it hard wearing.

If you have a genuinely old oak floor that looks a bit dull or badly stained it's worth seeking out a specialist to advise, you don't want to ruin a few centuries of patina with ill-advised sanding. There was a fashion a few years ago to sand and varnish softwood floors, most of these are now looking messy and should probably be covered with something.

'Parquet' flooring is made from small pieces of solid wood pieced together on a substrate, either conventional floorboards or concrete. These can be sanded and re-varnished several times, though again if it's really old consult an expert.

Modern solid wooden flooring falls somewhere between the traditional boards and parquet, it consists of random length boards too short to be laid direct on joists and has to be laid on top of an existing floor. Solid hardwood is expensive though so there are a couple of cheaper alternatives.

Layered flooring varies enormously, it may consist of a very thin layer of expensive wood on a plywood substrate, or a more substantial 5-6mm of solid wood on 2 or more layers of cheaper material. Bearing in mind that a sander will rip off a millimetre in the blink of an eye, even high quality layered wood can only be sanded once or twice.

Laminate flooring consists of a thin layer of melamine laminated onto a substrate of fibreboard, the melamine can be printed with any pattern including a wood grain effect, but it's not really wooden flooring. Melamine feels hard and cold to bare feet, and sounds hard too; footsteps and children's toys are a lot noisier on a laminate floor. If you drop something heavy and hard on wood, it will dent but hardly show. Drop something on laminate and it's likely to chip revealing the substrate.

That said, laminate is a great deal cheaper than solid and not a bad DIY fix for a bathroom, kitchen or playroom. Both layered and laminate flooring come in standard size panels rather than random boards, though the printing on laminates often seeks to imitate random boards.

Fixed or Floating?

Old parquet floors were always fixed to the substrate, usually with a bitumen based adhesive, and this is still feasible, though messy for DIY use. Solid and layered wooden flooring have a 'tongue & groove' system on the edges and it's possible to use 'secret nailing' through the tongues to fix flooring (see sketch). More recently though the manufacturers have developed systems of clips that fit in grooves in the underside of the boards thus holding them together.

These clips systems don't fix the boards to the floor, only to each other, so the whole lot 'floats'. Laminate flooring is too thin to allow the use of clips so floating floors are made by gluing the panels together. Unless firmly fixed to the substrate all wooden and laminate flooring should rest on a suitable underlay, the flooring manufacturers will specify the correct type for their product.

All materials expand and contract with changes in temperature; wood, especially solid wood, changes rather more with changes in humidity as well. If you don't have expansion gaps around the edges your floor is likely to bulge upwards when it gets warm or damp. Cork is traditional and can be varnished along with the wood. Laminate floors can be left floating with small gaps covered by mouldings, or if you are replacing the skirting board fit that over the edge of the floor.

Clever Touches

A broad expanse of flooring looks glorious but it's the awkward bits round radiator pipes and doorways that make or mar the job. For pipes the trick is to arrange the hole to fall between two boards. Fix the boards together temporarily away from the pipework and drill on the join line. Separate them then fit around the pipe. Cover the edges of the hole with a pipe shield.

Where the wooden flooring meets another type of flooring, typically in a doorway, you will need some form of threshold strip the cover the join. These have to be thin to avoid you tripping over them and wood that thin would split so they are usually plastic or metal.

Steps are tricky, but done well, as in the photo(LEFT/RIGHT/WHEREVER?) they become a great feature. If you have a tricky floor and woodwork isn't your forté, get an expert in.

Finishes

Most wooden flooring products are supplied with a finish already applied, the exception being parquet blocks which normally need cleaning, sanding and varnishing after laying. Some types are waxed or oiled rather than varnished. Melamine laminates need no finishing.

Maintenance

One of the attractions of wooden flooring is that on a day-to-day basis it is easier to clean than carpet. Dirt isn't absorbed, liquids can be wiped up and things like fleas and dust mites have no hiding place, an occassional sweep with a soft brush or vacuum is all you need. Do watch out for the wheels on some vacuum cleaners though, they can scratch the surface.

All these finishes are hard wearing, but none last for ever. Once again you should check with the suppliers/fitters for their recommendations, some wood floors should be oiled or waxed at intervals. The weekly floor polishing some older readers may remember from their youth is rarely necessary! Sanding and varnishing is only needed when the floor is badly worn.