Solid oak flooring.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Mate is re-vamping a living room. Size is approx 30 x 15ft - fairly typical through lounge in a modern house.

Concrete floor.

He wants a solid real oak floor. And matching skirting boards and architraves. And the window sill round the front curved window - which will be about 1ft deep.

Says - without having got any quotes - he can have it done for about 2 grand. Which seems very low to me.

About 5 years ago I did mine myself. Admittedly a bigger room, but it cost me a grand for decent engineered oak flooring - T&G plywood with a thick oak surface. And no skirting boards, etc. Or labour.

A quick look shows real oak at something like 50 quid a sq metre - and in random lengths from about 400-1200mm. I'd be looking for rather longer than 1200mm to avoid it looking like offcuts. ;-)

[nothanks]

Reclaimed oak parquet (on eBay, for example) is a lot cheaper

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Oh indeed. But he doesn't want parquet. Which is cheaper than planks because it is all offcuts. ;-)

[Andrew]

The stuff Wickes sold about 10 years ago, came in packs 1.2 metres long but out of 21 packs I only found one piece of flooring that was 1200mm, and a lot of 300mm ones.

Also it wasn't very good 'hardwood', very easy to scratch or dent. It was £30 /sq metre, which cost me £630 and for another £200 I could have got longer lengths and consistent species which the Wickes stuff wasn't, it looks like their Chinese supplier has used offcuts from other work to make the stuff.

Also, I glued mine into long, wide 'planks'. The wickes metal clips are useless, but you need to allow for expansion and contraction, so gluing onto a solid floor is not advised - the different species of wood move at different amounts. A couple of the shorter sections that I glued together to make larger planks have split slightly at the end during very dry weather.

Conclusion - use some good quality engineered interlocking planking. £2000 is too cheap. decent flooring will be that price alone, plus labour plus skirtings/frames.

[John Rumm]

Yup, does seem optimistic for solid wood.

About 18 months ago I did:

That was about £40/m^2 IIRC, (not including the underlay), and that was for 21mm thick engineered boards, where the oak layer was abound 1/4"

[tabbypurr]

Try used oak flooring planks.

NT

[Jim K..]

Mmmm I have approx 40m2 solid oak t & g glued straight to concrete here. It's not developed any issues in 15+ years