When Is The Best Time To Fit Flooring?

Irrespective of the type of flooring you have in mind, if you’re planning a flooring project for a new build, there is little doubt that getting the flooring laid before you move in is ideal, although not always possible.  So, if you find that your new build has run over your planned move in date and you’re forced to move into the house without your flooring complete, all is not lost.  Yes, you’re going to have to put up with some inconvenience, but there is no reason why your flooring project can’t be successfully completed after moving in.

When tackling a flooring project once in residence, you’re going to have to face up to the fact that you’re going to have to clear the room, or rooms affected.  While moving furnishings from one room to another can be a real pain, if you plan the clearing, it will be much simpler.  Firstly, it’s a good idea to know roughly how long the flooring installation is going to take.  If you’re having professional fitters fit your floor, they will be experienced and will be able to guide you fairly accurately on the end date.  If you’re doing the job on a DIY basis, try to work out your worst-case scenario and allow a bit of a contingency, so you’re not putting yourself under unnecessary pressure towards the end.

Because the weather in the UK can be pretty unpredictable (to say the least), it truly isn’t advisable to plan to place your furnishing outside while you fit your new flooring.  When it comes to clearing the room, if you have a garage, you’re laughing.  In this instance, you could move all of your furnishings, large and small into the garage and the only inconvenience is that you’ll need to park on the street or your driveway for the duration of the work.  If you don’t have a garage, you’ll need to decide what items can go where while the flooring work is being carried out.  Although moving things from room to room will seem a real hassle at the time, if you’ve made good flooring decisions, it’ll all be worthwhile in the end.

Quite often, when installing wood flooring, people worry about the season and any negative effect it could have on the end result.  Is there one season better than another for fitting wood flooring?  In short, the answer to that is “no”.  The reason that the season doesn’t matter for wood flooring in particular is that, as part of your overall project plan you should have allowed for the acclimatisation of your flooring before installing it.  Because wood reacts to temperature and humidity changes by expanding and contracting, it is a really important part of any successful wood flooring project to allow time for acclimatisation.  So, irrespective of the season, if you’ve taken time to allow your wood flooring to acclimatise into the atmosphere it’ll be fitted, you shouldn’t experience too many problems.  Acclimatisation of wood flooring isn’t an overnight process and can take up to two weeks.

That said, things to watch out for are: if you’ve recently laid a concrete sub floor or have recently had your room plastered, do make sure that the concrete and, or plaster have dried out thoroughly before laying any new flooring on top.