Laminate flooring is extremely popular these days. It gives a clean, stylish look to a house or apartment and can help people with allergies as it is easier to keep clean and dust free than carpet.
However, badly laid laminate flooring is an eyesore and can be embarrassing.
Carpet Glides
To make sure you lay your laminate flooring properly, follow these tips:
Prevent damage caused by furniture
Laminate flooring is usually chipboard covered with a laminate veneer to give the look of real wooden planks. This means that scratches cannot be sanded or varnished out. Get a deep scratch and the chipboard will show through making it look ugly.
You can prevent your furniture causing damage by attaching glides. This is basically a piece of plastic that forms the contact between the furniture and the floor. For large heavy furniture you can get wide glides that merely slip under or clip onto the legs of the furniture.
For furniture like bookcases that have flat wooden bottoms you can use tap in or screw in glides.
Plan your skirting and beading
You need to leave a little space between the laminate and the skirting. You can use a special tool to cut away the skirting so the laminate fits under the skirting but this is pretty tricky work and can be hard work and add an extra cost.
Laying the flooring
The long side of the laminate should be laid at a right angle to the window. This means that the light will not make the joins so obvious and the effect of the laminate is more like a realistic wooden floor.
Also, you should stagger the boards so that none of the short sides are next to each other inline as this does not make a good finish and can cause the floor not to be stable and bobble up at places.
Always buy more than you need
You can work out how much flooring you need by calculating the surface area of the room. You do this by the calculation length x width. Always allow for the fact that you will have unusable off cuts and may make mistakes. There is nothing worse than getting to the end of a job and realizing you have to trip back to the store to buy more laminate.
Also buying a pack from a different batch can lead to problems as it may look slightly different or you may have problems finding the exact same flooring.
All of this can be much easier if you employ handyman services.