Help on laying floor

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I need some pointers on dealing with doorways.

I'm laying a floating "engineered wood floor", which is 7"-wide planks that are designed to "click" together. They have an interlocking tongue and groove design that locks together without glue.

I'd like the floor to be a continuous surface from room to room through the doorways -- no raised "transition strip" if possible. The doorways that are parallel to the plank direction seem to be especially problematic.

I don't have a good way to cut a perfect joining edge, so I want to join with only the factory edges. I want all _my_ cuts to be under molding (or a transition strip where necessary). So it seems I need to lay things out so I have factory-cut edges in the doorways. And it seems like there's no way to guarantee this with doorways on opposite sides of a random-width room. The other problem is that in doorways, the planks have to be slid together sideways under the jamb and door moldings, rather than the preferred way of bringing adjoining planks together with one raised at an angle.

All the instructions I've seen are pretty vague about doorways. They suggest you sometimes need to chisel off the raised ridge that locks the other plank and glue instead.

I hope this is all clear. I'd sure appreciate any specific suggestions -- or web sites -- you can give me to make this work.

TIA.

-- Joel

[Earl Kurtz]

"default" wrote

Hi Joel,

I'm a certified installer of engineered floating floors, certified by 2 different major manufacturers.

Although you may want your floor to be a continuous surface, this is a bad idea.

First, on any basic instructions, it will tell you to acclimate the flooring x amount of hours, to the room it will used in. This is because each room in your home, has different levels of humidity. Installing one continuous surface will cause the flooring to expand/contract at different rates. Which will cause severe problems including separation or buckling.

Most if not all of the engineered floating products prohibit running a continous flooring from a large area to an opening under 4 feet wide without a "T-molding" because of the expansion/contraction. Also, most if not all manufacturers require a T-molding if the area is longer than 66 feet.

For awhile, I had worked inspecting claims for "faulty" flooring. Needless to say, almost all "faulty" floors were because of not following manufacturing instructions on the installation procedures.

Do yourself a favor, and don't try to re-invent the wheel on this installation. I believe you will be very unhappy with the outcome.

[Don Young]

In addition to Earl's good advice, you likely couldn't do what you want to because the tolerances on your house are not accurate enough and the dimensions change with temperature and humidity. Note that the manufacturer's instructions will not even let you fit the flooring tightly to the wall.

Don Young

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Thanks Earl and Don.

What you say makes sense, so I'll use the T-molding as you recommend. I'm very grateful for the advise and the explanation.

-- Joel