Professional Installation

If you are installing solid timber, these boards will also be nailed down as well as glued to restrain the floor from cupping.

If you are choosing an engineered floor you won’t have to nail the boards as engineered flooring doesn’t move like a solid timber flooring.

If you are purchasing a floor which is going to be a permanent, long term feature of your home or office then you should choose to direct stick your floor.

The timber flooring installation process of direct stick is a craft and needs to be done by a highly skilled professional. The fact that these floors are stuck down with very strong glue means there isn’t much room for error and it’s much harder to fix and replace boards which are laid incorrectly.

The benefit of direct sticking your floor is you can sand and polish the surface multiple times. From our experience a solid timber floor will typically be re-sanded every 10 to 15 years to preserve it’s look and feel.

Not only does a direct stick installation last a lot longer, it’s also a lot more durable and less susceptible to water damage. Again, the trick to direct stick is making sure it gets installed by a skilled craftsman as it will require a lot more prep work.

The sub-layer must be cleared of all protrusions, sealed with moisture barrier, and in some cases grinder flat. It needs this extra care from the beginning as it truly is a long-term timber flooring installation method.

Floating floors are joined together with glue-less tongue and groove clicking systems and laid on an underlay.

This underlay will differ in quality and thickness, but fundamentally this underlay is designed to offer a cushioning effect and a moisture barrier for the floating surface.

If your timber flooring installation is without underlay or foam base it can increase the risk of damaging the boards and cause the floor to creak as the raw elements grind against each other.

Ideal reasons for choosing to float a floor would be if you didn’t own the location or have a very high traffic environment such as a store of office. Floating floors will have some footfall noise (hollow echo) caused by its soft underlay.

A big benefit of a floating floor is that it doesn’t need a lot of prep work before laying and is suitable for DIY.

If the sublayer is contaminated by drops of paint, glue or isn’t perfectly level, you can cancel these defects out with quality underlay. If you have a larger lumps in the concrete you will have to grind it down, but if you have hollow areas in the floor most installers will float straight over it and it typically won’t affect the floors performance.