Advice with direction of laminate flooring

[anteel]

Hello, I'm laying some laminate flooring this weekend and have seen a fair bit of conflicting advice about the direction - most say the longest dimension but my room is not a straight rectangle. I have a very long, narrowing lounge/diner, and at the moment, the damaged laminate I'm replacing is laid lengthways down the full length of the room. The room can look very "bowling alley" as it is.

So as I read things, conventional wisdom is to lay the laminate along the longest dimension starting opposite the doors - but as you can see below, the longest side has an archway and a hearth (black rectangles) to navigate, and this wall is definitely not square i.e the depth of both the hearth and the plinth are both deeper on one side that the other, if that makes sense).

My plan was to lay the first plank in the corner shown, effectively the longest length of un-interrupted wall in the room, width-ways across the room. As you can see both doors are in one of the side walls (red) so the flooring will face away from the doors as you enter, and sofas, tv etc are all along the long walls.

Anything wrong with this?

The flooring is 4V bevelled, but only lightly grained, so I'm hoping to avoid the "ladder effect" being too pronounced or ideally to draw the eye away from the length of the room. It's a concrete floor so no issues with floor joists, right?

What do you think?

Thanks in advance, Ant

Untitled

• anteel
• 13 Feb 2014
• 1

 

[anteel]

The windows are at either end - SW facing by the "3.5m" line and NE facing at the other narrower end. Generally it's quite a dark room, despite being dual-aspect, due to trees etc.

 

[crazydaze]

You can lay in either direction.

Generally, laminate should be laid towards the main light source as this means that the light runs down the long joints not across the long joints as this can make the floor look ripply.

There is not a wrong or right way, although in my experience, many customers struggle to visualise anything other than down the length of the longest wall, things light light source and furniture positioning etc will aesthetically make the difference.

 

[WabbitPoo]

Whatever you do, you'll have fiddlyness to sort out either at the doorways or the other features. Just go with gut instinct.

Is the flooring the type that needs an entire row to go down in one piece, or can you click each one to the previous and to the current row at the same time? (they are SO nice to lay!)