Thursday 9 July 2009

Seven Steps to Installing Hardwood Laminate Flooring

Once you have all your tools, acclimatized your bamboo hardwood laminate flooring boards and have a perfectly level sub floor, you are ready to start installing your laminate floor. The main seven steps to doing this are:

1. Determine what direction the laminate boards will lay. Usually if there is a great deal of light coming from outside through a door or window, the planks lay in a direction away from the light.

2. The first board laid with one end against a wall and one side against an adjacent wall. Place plastic spacers that come with the boards between the board and the walls. When finished laying the bamboo laminate flooring, these will be removed and the space will give the flooring room to expand if necessary.

3. Fit the end of a second board into the the end of the first board, again placing spacers between it's side and the wall. Use the hammering tool you will have received with the boards to lightly hammer each board into the next. Continue to do this until there is not enough room to place a board between the end of the last board and the approaching wall. Measure the distance between the end of the last board and the approaching wall and cut a board to this length (less the size of a spacer). Then place this cut down board into the end of the last board laid and place spacers at the end of the newly laid board and between it and the wall. There's your first row laid.

4. Use the off cut from the last bamboo laminate board as the first board of the next row, if the off cut is long enough. If it is not long enough, then start the second row with a standard board beginning from the end that you finished the first row with. The aim here is to have the ends of the boards in each row staggered so that they do not line up.

5. Use aluminium mouldings to finish off boards that end in a doorway leading outside or into another room that has a different floor covering. These can usually be bought at your bamboo hardwood laminate flooring retailer. Similarly, you can use moulding to connect laminate flooring in doorways between rooms where both rooms have laminate flooring. Alternatively, you can continue the same boards from one room into another but this can be tricky. Sometimes it requires shaving down the tongue in a tongue and groove system so that a board on one side of the door will easily slide straight into a board on the other side. Note that the only way to do this is to have both boards running along the doorway, not through it.

6. Continue with this until the entire floor has been covered with bamboo hardwood laminate boards. Then remove the spacers.

7. If you already have skirting boards and the flooring has been laid up to them, then you will use moulding to cover the gap between the flooring and the skirting boards. Otherwise if the flooring has been laid up to the bottom of the walls, then you will now install skirting boards to cover the gap.

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