Fitting Laminate Flooring

The European producers of laminate flooring, the EPLF, state in their installation bulletin that laminate floor coverings are by conception intended for floating installation; a full-surface adhesive bond is an exception for special circumstances, for example at a client's specific request, and before bonding a laminate over its full surface the installer is urged to check with the manufacturer whether the product is suitable or approved for it. A floating floor is not fixed to the subfloor at all: the boards lock to each other and the whole surface sits on the underlay as one sheet, free to expand and contract as a sheet. Everything else in this guide follows from that.

Shop the rangeLaminate

The twelve laminate boards share one specification: an HDF core, 8 mm thick, 193 mm wide and 1204 mm long, a click joint with a micro-bevelled edge, abrasion class AC4, ten boards to a box covering 2.32 m², listed as compatible with underfloor heating and carrying a 25-year manufacturer's warranty. The choice between them is the decor. For fitting they are one product, and the instructions in the box are the specification the fitter works to; what follows is the trade guidance that sits behind those instructions.

The MMFA, the association for multilayer modular floor coverings, requires the flooring to acclimatise for at least 48 hours in the same conditions as the installation area, stored flat and cross-stacked in unopened boxes at roughly 15 to 25 °C and 35 to 65 per cent relative humidity. An HDF core takes on and gives up moisture with the air around it, and a board that arrives from a cold van and is laid the same afternoon will move after it is down rather than before. The room's heating should be running as it will be in use.

The MMFA groups what an underlay does under three headings: levelling small unevenness so that the joints sit right, protecting the board from wear beneath and from residual building moisture, and improving impact sound, walking noise, heat insulation and comfort. For underlays under laminate, EN 16354 sets the test methods, and the EPLF's bulletin says the underlay's impact sound value, ISLam, should be at least 14 dB, tested with the reference floor covering described in the standard. A higher figure on a datasheet is that manufacturer's own declaration. Over underfloor heating the underlay's thermal resistance is the figure to check, and the underlay guide and the underfloor heating guide take that further. The laminate listings in the range name no underlay as included, so it is a separate line on the order.

How to chooseFlooring Underlay: What It Does and How to Choose

Buying guideBest Flooring for Underfloor Heating: What Works and What to Avoid

The EPLF recommends an edge gap of 8 mm to 12 mm on all sides of a floating floor, so that the covering can expand and contract without lifting. All sides means every wall, every doorway, every pipe and every fixed kitchen unit, and the gap is kept open by spacers while the floor is laid and covered afterwards by skirting or beading that is fixed to the wall, not to the floor. A gap that is filled, or a skirting nailed down through the boards, turns a floating floor into a fixed one at that point, and the movement it was designed to make has to go somewhere else.

EN 13329, the laminate product standard, does not cover areas subject to frequent wetting, and names bathrooms, laundry rooms and saunas. No underlay, gap or joint changes that. For those rooms the range's answer is rigid vinyl listed as waterproof or porcelain, and the LVT against laminate guide draws the line.

How to chooseLaminate AC Ratings Explained

Care guideLaminate Floor Care

Technical guideSubfloor Requirements

Shop the rangeLVT

Whether the ground floor is a screed or suspended timber, and whether it has a membrane, depends on when the house was built. Browse by town and region.

DeliveryWhere we deliver