What are my options for flooring for the ground floor please? It's a through lounge/diner with a total area of 28m2, and I'd like to keep the cost down to £300-500 if possible. I'd also like to lay it in a day, or so.
Last time I did something like this was 1995, and I bought laminate flooring from Ikea. That seemed okay, and it was not too hard to lay.
Am I going to get anything reasonable for my budget, and do I now need to look at something 'engineered' or perhaps LVT? Both seem to be £20/m2 upwards.
pallet wood fits that budget. Comes up nicely, but a lot of cutting & sandi ng required. The other option is vinyl tiles, and I would not especially re commend them.
replying to GB, Iggy wrote: Your only options in that budget area appear to be Sheet Vinyl or Laminate. Once installed you can't tell the difference between them and you can get both in High Traffic and Extra Scratch Resistance heavier or commercial duties.
Thanks for all this. I definitely don't want sheet vinyl. At the moment the space is carpeted, and I can get it recarpeted for under £500. I just thought that maybe some wooden flooring would be nicer.
How much do I need to spend to get reasonable looking wood flooring, and what do people recommend? I can increase the budget if necessary.
replying to GB, Iggy wrote: If you're thinking its still the same old kitchen stuff, then you should really go take a look in person. Waterproof, seamless, cheap, goes down in minutes and very hard to tell the difference from real wood or tile.
Nothing. Pallets are free. It comes up fine, just needs more work as it's n ot prepared as ready-made wood flooring is. And you'll be left with a ton o f offcuts where it has nail holes, splits etc.
Prices vary dramatically by where you buy it. I got some very nice decent plywood base oak faced from Ebay for a lot less than shop prices. The big problem is knowing what you are buying, quality wise. Stuff with lots of knots in the facing will be cheaper than without. The larger each 'plank', the more pricey too.
I paid about £1000 to do a 'through lounge' - about 32 x 16 ft. Looks superb. Had to buy a nailer to fit it - but sold it afterwards for just about what it cost.
Alternatively consider Tongue-Tite screws, but test out their "no splitting" claim on an offcut of your particular boards rather than trusting it blindly, I had to drill a pilot.
I recently put down some cheep laminate from Wickes. It looks good, feels good, has an easier surface to clean than wood the only real disadvantage I can see is that it supposedly expands and contracts, but I put silicone caulk between the floor and skirting and can see no sign of movement.
I have no idea how long it will last.
I have not been impressed by actual wood floors they are harder to maintain and often look a bit ropey.
I would have preferred waterproof luxury vinyl but wasn't prepared to pay more than double to get it.
I had up to 20mm high and low spots after I chucked my carpet out. :-(
I ended up digging out the entire ground floor screed which then revealed a slab that was even more uneven. Luckily it came up in big chunks by hammering a brick bolster into the joint twixt slab and screed then bashing the screed to shatter it.
I spent ages fitting 3x2 battens long side vertical, each trimmed to follow the contours and with the underside notched out and infilled with 25mm celotex, so only a third of the length of each length was touching the floor. I screwed them into the concrete (through a blue 1000 guage 2ndary dpm) using concrete screws from the same firm as tite-screws. I went for a 250mm spacing infilled with 70mm quinntherm or 60 mm knauf loftboards where the slab had a hump required a lot of 'trimming' to the batten.
Finished off with Wickes 18mm solid wood flooring, glued to create long wide planks out of the short bits that it seemed to be made of.
With hindsight I wish I had spent a bit more on decent flooring. The wickes stuff seems to be a variety of species that expand and contract at different rates so some glued joints have shrinkage cracks at their ends. It also scratches and dents very easily, so one day I will hire a floor planer and remove all the wickes varnish and apply some wood hardener followed by a decent coating of polyurethane varnish.
Combined with a similar treatment to the north-facing front wall (50mm celotex fitted with 30mm horizontal fitted on top of the celotex using 120 mm frame anchors and infilled with
30mm celotex, giving 80mm, means I hardly need any heat to get it up to 20 centigrade and keep it there.
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