Flooring notes

The stuff worth knowing before you pick a floor.

No sales pitch here. Just the questions we get asked most often on Sydney jobs, answered the way we would answer them standing in your living room.

01 · Choosing

Which floor for which room

Most people start by asking which floor is best. The better question is which floor suits the room it is going into. A finish that is perfect in a bedroom can be a mistake in a kitchen.

02 · Climate

Sydney humidity and your floor

Floors move. Timber and timber-based boards take on moisture from the air in a humid February and give it back in a dry August, and they change size very slightly as they do it. That is normal and a properly installed floor absorbs it without complaint. The problems start when the movement has nowhere to go.

Three things stop that becoming your problem, and all three happen before the first board is clicked together.

• Acclimatisation. Boards sit in the actual room they are going into, not in the garage or the hallway, for as long as the manufacturer specifies. Skipping this is the single most common cause of gaps appearing a few months later.
• Moisture testing. Concrete slabs hold water long after they look and feel dry, and a newer slab holds a lot of it. We test before we lay rather than hoping.
• Expansion gaps. A small gap around the perimeter, hidden by skirting or beading, gives the floor somewhere to expand into. Butt a floating floor hard against the wall and it has only one direction left to go, which is up.

Coastal and lower level homes tend to run damper than the average, and a ground floor slab behaves differently to a first floor timber subfloor in the same house. Worth mentioning when you send your measurements.

03 · Apartments

Living in strata? Read this first.

This is the one that catches people out, and it catches them out after the floor is already down. Most strata schemes have by-laws covering floor coverings, and swapping carpet for a hard floor usually needs approval from the owners corporation before the work starts. Some schemes also set a minimum standard for impact noise insulation, which is the thud a heel makes on the ceiling of the apartment below rather than the sound of a conversation.

Practical order of operations:

• Ask your strata manager for a copy of the by-laws before you choose anything
• Check whether there is a required acoustic rating, and whether they want it certified
• Get written approval in hand rather than a verbal yes at the letterbox
• Then pick your floor and underlay to meet the number, not the other way around

Retrofitting acoustic underlay means lifting the entire floor, so it is a great deal cheaper to get this right at the start. Tell us it is an apartment when you request a quote and we will spec the underlay accordingly.

04 · Measuring

How to measure, and why we order extra

You do not need to be precise for a quote. Length times width for each room, rounded up to the nearest ten centimetres, is plenty for us to price the job. Treat an L-shaped room as two rectangles and add them together. Include hallways, and tell us about doorways where the new floor meets tile or carpet, because those need a trim.

What surprises people is the waste allowance. Every board that gets cut to fit a wall leaves an offcut, and not all of those offcuts are long enough to start the next row. A straight lay in a simple rectangular room wastes the least. Diagonal layouts, herringbone and chevron waste considerably more because almost every board at the perimeter gets cut at an angle. Rooms with lots of nooks, a bay window or a kitchen island push it up too.

It is worth keeping a few spare boards from the same batch once the job is finished. Dye lots shift between production runs, and if a board ever needs replacing, a plank from the original batch will match in a way that a fresh order may not.

05 · Care

Looking after it

Grit is what actually wears a floor out. Not shoes, not the dog, not the kids. Fine sand and dirt tracked in from outside sits on the surface and gets ground into it every time someone walks past. A decent doormat at each entry does more for the life of your floor than any product you can buy.

• Sweep or vacuum more often than you mop, and use a hard floor head rather than a beater bar
• Mop damp, not wet. Standing water finds its way into the joins
• Keep steam mops off laminate and timber. Heat and moisture together is the worst combination for a board
• Felt pads under every chair and table leg, replaced when they wear through
• Lift furniture rather than dragging it, especially anything with a metal foot
• Wipe spills when they happen rather than when you next walk past
• Skip the wax, polish and all-purpose spray unless it is made for your floor type

Direct afternoon sun will fade most floors over years, timber more visibly than the rest. If one end of a room gets hammered by western sun, moving a rug occasionally keeps the colour even.