Engineered Floor over both concrete and timber

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Hi

We're just about to order an engineered floor for our soon-to-be open plan kitchen dining room, which will be approx 8m x 4.5m in size (once the wall gets taken away!). The existing dining room has the original timber floor boards, while the kitchen is concrete (built 1922, we assume no DPM). There are a few issues we still need to iron out, and was hoping for some advice!

The flooring is 190mm wide, 22m thick, 2m long, with a 6mm oak veneer on top of 16mm ply. It's a beast, and looks fantastic.

Would we be okay to float this floor? The place we are buying from say yes, but also say that if they were installing, they would nail/glue it anyway. Seems like overkill for engineered flooring - are there any obvious issues with floating this over a 32m2 area like this?

Underfloor - they want me to use that light green 3mm 'barrier' foam, with built in moisture barrier over the entire area. This seems to be a bad idea over the existing timber, as it means condensation could form leading to rot in the underfloor. Would we not be better to lay a plastic DPM over the concrete area first, then lay a standard 3mm foam over the entire timber/concrete area, thus ensuring the same underfloor immediately under the new flooring?

Height difference - concrete floor looks like it will be around 3mm higher than the existing timber floor. To bring them level, will fist laying 3mm hardboard over just the timber area suffice here? We'd then lay the foam on top.

Direction - beyond aesthetics, are there any physical/practical issues that could dictate the direction we lay the boards for a floating floor like this?

Aesthetically, laying them along the longest wall seems the most natural way for me, although this isn't 'towards the light'. Also at the entrance to the new room (standard doorway), the new boards will meet the existing varnished hallway boards (via a threshold strip) - from a visual POV, is it typical to aim to have the new boards run perpendicular to the boards in the joining room?

Thanks for any advice!
 
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Underfloor - they want me to use that light green 3mm 'barrier' foam, with built in moisture barrier over the entire area. This seems to be a bad idea over the existing timber, as it means condensation could form leading to rot in the underfloor. Would we not be better to lay a plastic DPM over the concrete area first, then lay a standard 3mm foam over the entire timber/concrete area, thus ensuring the same underfloor immediately under the new flooring?
Indeed, you should not use the Barrier Plus over the existing floorboards, use the normal Barrier for this (same thickness as the Plus). Staple the hardboard diagonal over the existing boards to eliminate as much draft as possible.
Floating is not a problem, as long as you glue all the T&G's correctly: How to glue T&G boards the correct way and leave wide enough expansion gaps around the whole perimeter of the floor.

Aesthetically - to what you think is/looks right in your home, there are no real rules of thumb here.
 

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