In this short video Sally Warburton, a director of leading wood floor business, Ted Todd & sons describes some wood floor fitting basics.
Video Transcript
Hi I’m Sally Warburton from Ted Todd & Sons and on behalf of Floor Ideas.co.uk I’m going to show you the basics of fitting a wooden floor.
First of all we’re going to talk about solid wood. Later on in the scheme of things I’m going to talk to you about the subfloor but let’s pretend that the subfloor is absolutely perfect.
The traditional way of fitting a floor is by secret nailing using 2inch serrated nails. These are used with a secret nailer, either a pneumatic one or one that you use with a hammer. And the nail actually goes through the tongue at 45 degree angle, shoots through the timber and out the other side. And that’s where it will affix to the subfloor, be it flooring grade chipboard and that’s really important; ordinary chipboard is not dense enough to hold nails, ply – or an existing timber floor.
Some floor fitters I know, say that you can fit these nails every 300mm centres but others particularly where the boards might be slightly bent, suggest you use them every 100 or 150mm. That’s an excellent way of fitting. Sometimes you have a concrete subfloor and of course you can’t nail into that, and that’s where a good quality, specialist, flooring grade adhesive is used and you actually adhere the floor onto the concrete.
With these engineered floorboards the fitting situation’s very much easier. You always need an underlay and we have several, from a 7mm fibreboard to a specialist underlay for under floor heating, or even a 3mm foam underlay.
Then with the click boards you can then just click them together and float them over the underlay. You can also use a bead of PVA glue which just goes along the corner of the tongue that’s just to seal the joint, bang the boards together and wipe off any residue with a well rung out damp cloth. You can also secret nail the board this actually is an engineered floorboard here and as you can see it has been secret nailed through the tongue onto the subfloor.
There are several things to remember, the first one, if you’ve got a solid floor never, ever put adhesive on the tongues and grooves, timber expands and contracts naturally and if you stick the tongues and grooves together it can’t do that, so you end up with a heap in the middle of your floor.
Always, always remember to leave your expansion gaps we would suggest between 10mm and 15mm all the way around the room. If you have an engineered floorboard use a good quality underlay and you should be very, very happy.
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