Engineered Flooring

Aaargh, another problem with the job my eldest is expecting me to manage while he works away to earn the money to pay the craftsmen brought in as he discovers that diy takes effort.

He has decided on and bought tongue and grooved (not click together) engineered boards (quite thin, maybe 3mm?) for the whole ground floor, apart from the kitchen. So we have

  1. Dining room - a concrete floor with some small cracks, and someone is coming tomorrow to coat this in self-levelling compound.
2 Hall - glazed floor tiles which have troughs chased for the cabling that started the whole thing. These will be filled with sand and cement, but the main area is tiled. 3 Lounge - wooden flooring that has been good in its day. I believe this is laid onto plywood over floorboards.

Current thinking is that we need some sort of underlay and that the t&g should be glued (using pva?) to itself to result in a "floating" floor on top of the underlay. He is thinking of the fibreboard 5mm underlay throughout as sold by Wickes, but we are not sure how well this will work on the various surfaces. We think OK on the concrete and tiles, but the lounge floor does seem to have a bit of give.

Many of the doors are off, so the height should be no problem, and there was carpet + underlay in the lounge. There might be a bit of a height bodge needed where the floor meets the tiled internal porch.

The problem with all this is that we have been let down again by someone who was going to do the job. We have a painter who does general woodwork and this is stopping him fitting the new architrave and skirting boards. He might fit the floor and do the gluing but doesn't know whether smaller areas of flooring need the glue to set before moving on to the next "block".

Any guidance, as always, gratefully received.

Reply to
Bill
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3mm engineered wood - you sure? That's not far off veneer :-)

I used the Wickes 5mm underlay. It's OK, but you do need a reasonably level and stable floor. Laying laminate, I did end up replacing, packing or reversing a few boards because the dip was more than a couple of mm, and the movement with the laminate down was noticeable.

You'd probably need a threshold strip anyway?

Reply to
RJH

I have engineered wood flooring in my downstairs rooms and hallway, and its a lot thicker then 3mm, probably more like 10 or 12mm from memory. My cousin helped me to put all this down a few years ago, and is still looking good.

Reply to
BobH

My engineered flooring has a 3mm top layer - on top of about 15mm of ply type base!

Reply to
Tim Watts

In message , BobH writes

Ooops, yes, I think his is probably 10mm, and maybe the 3mm was the thickness of the top veneer. It's definitely a thin type, though.

I'd be interested to know what, if anything, you put it on in the way of underlay. Was it glued to itself or glued to the floor?

Reply to
Bill

My engineered flooring is about 14mm overall, with the top hardwood (beech) layer of about 3mm.

Mine is glued together, and floats on the sub-floor - with an underlay which consists of a damp-proof membrane with about 3mm of foam bonded to it. The underlay came in strips (1 metre wide?) with a couple of inches down one side which was just membrane with no foam, to allow the membrane to be overlapped on the joins without increasing the thickness.

I glued the boards together, and used proper flooring-type ratchet strap clamps to clamp them together until the glue had set. I removed the skirting boards before laying the floor, leaving an expansion gap all round which was covered by the skirting when it was put back. I also undercut the door frames and architraves and slid the boards under them (again with an invisible expansion gap). My flooring is in an L-shaped hallway with lots of doors - not to mention a newel post at the bottom of the stairs which also had to be undercut - so I had to think very carefully about the order of doing things!

Reply to
Roger Mills

In message , Bill writes

*Professional* did our engineered floor. He used 3mm polythene backed foam as underlay. Totally ignored my query about the impact on under floor heating.

Does work OK but I have to run the water at 50deg.C which is hotter than specified.

Reply to
Tim Lamb

Now you come to mention it mine is glued as well and floats on a subfloor of 6mm wpb plywood and foam underlay.

Reply to
BobH

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