Solid wood floor in a knocked through living/dining room

[beardy247]

Hi,

I'm about to lay an 18mm solid oak floating floor in my living/dining room, the two rooms have been knocked through with a 2m opening between the two rooms. This means that my starting 'long' wall opposite the door has a 1m protruding wall in the middle and to further complicate matters a fire place 3/4 of the way along. The run length through the opening will be a touch over 8m.

Where should I start? I really want to avoid having a 'T' bar down the middle of the room and even if I did I'd still need to get everything straight. My gut feeling is that i should put down a batten and start with a full run 15mm in from the end of the protruding wall, then work back the other way when I reach the door wall.

Thanks in advance,

Adam

 

[WoodYouLike]

How wide and long is your solid wood floor? If narrower than 100mm and many - too many - short lengths, you should not install such a floor floating but fully bonded to the concrete or if you go over existing floorboards nailing them.

As for where to start the installation: in front of the fire place with a long board, then filling in behind it

 

[beardy247]

It's 150mm mixed lengths. I take it that it's not possible to do secret nailing when filling in behind the starting point?

 

[WoodYouLike]

You're right about that, or you have to wriggle a bit.

How random - minimum and maximum length - are the random lengths?

 

[beardy247]

I don't know until I open all the packs and as I've got a lot of decorating to do before I start on the floor I don't want to split them yet. They're Wickes boards and the packaging states that they're suitable for use as a floating floor.

I like the idea of secret nailing, but with the shape of the room I'd end up with having to face nail a significant portion of the room which would defeat the object somewhat.

 

[WoodYouLike]

If from Wickes they're bound to be 300 - 1200mm with loads of (too) short lengths, which when installed floating, will make your whole floor unstable and prone to movement.
Every joint will act as a hinge, see this article here too

 

[Floorsave]

Hi Adam,

First of all, it is advisable to fix a solid wood floor to the subfloor with the correct fixings and not glue them together.

The advised way to lay the flooring would be to lay the floor from front of the house to the back. This means that the flooring will run adjacent to the fireplace.

You will need to set out first to make sure the flooring will be straight. You would normally start from the doorway and get your runs with the tongue facing away from you. This would mean that you will probably be going to the right of the doorway and will be putting in about 4-7 rows in that part of the room. When you can get a full row in that will go past the protruding wall into the other room.

This will mean that you have the first room fitted along the wall into the room and you will have one row going all the way into both rooms going through the 2m gap.

Fit off of the row that you have got going through the gap. You will now be fitting the 2 rooms together but will still have a gap on the second room behind the protruding wall. Once you have fitted the rest of the two rooms and around the fireplaces you can go back to the missing part.

You will now have to fit backwards with the tongue to go off. You will need to make a false tongue from a thin piece of wood. A false tongue is a piece of timber that fits in the groove of the wood and fits into the groove on the wood that you want to join onto. This is 2 pieces of wood flooring groove to groove withe the false tongue fitting into both grooves with PVA adhesive.

Once you have fitted the false tongue and the next row, then you should be able to work backwards to finish the second room.

 

[beardy247]

If nailing is the way to go there's another couple of complications, firstly the dining room has had its fireplace and chimney breast removed so there's a patch of concrete that I won't be able to nail into, what are my options? Do i remove the concrete and fill in with 18mm ply or do I just need to glue the boards to the concrete? Secondly the joist run in differing directions in each room, would over boarding with 3.6mm ply be sufficient or would i need 5.5mm or even 18mm?