Cutting skirting board for laminate flooring

You can get saws for trimming the bottoms of doors in situ which would probably do - or even a biscuit jointer.

You need wedges between the wall and flooring on the starting side - which can't subsequently be removed with the skirting in place. Likewise, you need to get *beyond* the last board to lever them all together - which again you can't do with the skirting in place.

Remove - and probably renew - the skirting board (it's not *that* expensive!) and make a proper job of it.

Laminate flooring looks nice, but as far as I am concerned, it makes a room echo like mad and is not really a pleasant experience for the neighbours either. My neighbour has laminate flooring and we can ear everytime someone walks into her lounge

Carpets are much better

Bite the bullet - remove the skirting and chuck it ... then fit new skirting, if you choose something deeper it will make for easier fitting - spanning the wall skim joint if there is one.

You might find it worthwhile to refit with good thick beads of mastik adhesive .. I used Pink Grip on my skirtings - seems to have much better first 'grab' than Gripfill, and is much stronger than the diy stuff ... no-more nails etc. But make sure you get rid of all loose dust - and wipe back of boards with meths first to remove any resin. Pack underneath to hol it up ... and then screw, nail or pin to hold until glue sets.

I bought a cutter that fitted to a angle grinder to undercut the skirting's, waste of money and effort, remove the skirting's and replace, I used white UPVC, that was five years ago, her indoors still says what a nice job I did :-)) Joe

Agreed. Nothing will do that kind of cut. You don't have to wreck the skirting just by taking it off. What you probably will wreck is the plaster/battens behind it, but that's easy enough to repair.

We've just laid laminate flooring in our lounge and I'm never doing it again. We used that Aqualok clicky together stuff and it took me 15 hours. I'm not particularly cack handed so either I missed something really obvious or you have to assemble a whole run (i.e. room width) of the stuff then click it into the previous run.

Anyway we didn't used a bead or cur the skirting. We used a 1 cm wide cork strip round the edge and left it exposed. Of course you do have to make sure the edges line up perfectly especially in the middle round the hearth.

Thanks to all for your advice, very helpful. David.

If he ever goes back to carpets he'll (possibly) have noticeable gaps around the skirting and under the doors.

If you do take it off, don't throw it away though, reuse it!

Just lay the carpet on the laminate surely?

I believe so...

Never thought of that, lol!

Do not forget, the bodgers put the laminate on the carpet underlay.

Adam