A click-fit engineered floor is genuinely within reach of a careful amateur. The clicking itself is the easy part — what decides the result is everything you do before the first board goes down.
Before anything: acclimatise
Leave the packs flat in the room where the floor will be laid, for 48 to 72 hours minimum, with the heating in its normal state and all wet trades finished. Keep engineered packs closed. Skipping this is the single most common cause of failure.
Check the substrate
- Flatness — 5 mm maximum under a 2 m straightedge, 1 mm under 20 cm. Grind high spots, fill hollows with levelling compound.
- Dryness — on concrete, moisture must be below 2.5 %. Measure it; do not guess.
- Cleanliness — vacuum thoroughly. A single stone under the underlay will click for years.
Underlay and vapour barrier
On concrete, lay a polyethylene vapour barrier of at least 200 microns, overlapping the sheets by around 20 cm and turning it up the walls. On an existing wood floor, do not use a vapour barrier — trapped moisture is worse than none.
Then the underlay, butted not overlapped.
Choosing direction
Lay parallel to the light from the main window: the joints disappear instead of casting small shadows. Over an existing wood floor, however, you must lay perpendicular to the old boards — that rule overrides the light.
The expansion gap
This is the one thing that cannot be negotiated. Leave 8 to 10 mm minimum against every wall and every fixed object — pipes, door frames, thresholds. Use spacers and leave them in until the end.
A floor with no room to expand will lift. There is no repair.
Laying
- Start in the left-hand corner, tongue to the wall, and work left to right.
- Stagger the end joints by at least 30 cm from one row to the next. Aligned joints look like a grid and weaken the floor.
- Mix boards from several packs as you go. Emptying one pack at a time creates visible patches of colour.
- End-cut offcuts over 30 cm start the next row — that is how you keep waste at 5 to 8 %.
- Use a tapping block, never hit the board edge directly.
Cuts
- Around a pipe — drill a hole 20 mm larger than the pipe, cut through, glue the offcut back, cover with a rose.
- Under a door frame — cut the frame, not the board. Use an offcut as a depth guide.
- Last row — measure each board individually; walls are never parallel.
Finishing
Remove the spacers. Fit skirting to the wall, never to the floor — the floor must be free to move underneath. Add thresholds at doorways.
The four mistakes that cost the most
- Not acclimatising.
- Laying on an uneven substrate.
- Skipping or blocking the expansion gap.
- Nailing the skirting through the floor.
None of these can be fixed afterwards without lifting the floor.