How to Lay Laminate Flooring

What you need

Laminate boards, underlay, a saw (a hand saw or jigsaw for cuts, a mitre saw if you have one), spacers, a tapping block, a pull bar, a pencil, a tape measure and knee pads. Buy the underlay the board manufacturer recommends — the wrong underlay voids warranties and makes the floor noisy.

Step 1 — Let the boards acclimatise

Leave the sealed packs in the room for 48 hours before you lay them. Laminate expands and contracts with temperature and humidity, and boards laid straight from a cold garage will move after fitting. While you wait, check the subfloor: it must be flat (no more than 3 mm of variation over 2 m), clean and dry.

Step 2 — Lay the underlay

Roll the underlay out at right angles to the direction the boards will run, butt the edges together and tape the seams. Do not overlap it — overlaps make ridges under the floor. Underlay is sold by the roll, so work out how many rolls you need before you buy: the laminate flooring calculator gives you the underlay area along with the board count.

Step 3 — Lay the first rows

Start along the longest straight wall, with spacers between the boards and the wall — laminate needs a 10 mm expansion gap all round, covered later by skirting or beading. Click the boards together at an angle and lower them flat. Stagger the end joints by at least 300 mm from row to row, like brickwork: joints that line up are weak and look wrong.

Step 4 — Cut the last row and the door frames

Measure the last row and cut the boards lengthways. At door frames, undercut the architrave with a saw and slide the board underneath — it looks far better than cutting round the frame. Remove the spacers when the floor is down and fit the skirting or beading to cover the expansion gap.

Worked example

A room 15 ft × 12 ft is 180 ft² (16.72 m²). With planks 48 × 7.5 in and 10% wastage, that is 80 planks. If one box covers 20 ft², you need 10 boxes. The underlay for the same room is 180 ft², so two 100 ft² rolls cover it. Those are exactly the numbers the laminate flooring calculator gives you.

Common mistakes

• No expansion gap. Laminate expands. Without a gap it buckles in summer — and the fix is lifting the floor.
• Joints lining up. End joints in a straight line look wrong and make the floor weak. Stagger every row.
• Laying it in a bathroom. Standard laminate is not for wet rooms. Use a water-resistant product or tile instead.

Safety

Wear a dust mask when cutting boards and keep the saw guard on — laminate dust is fine and irritating. Knee pads are not optional on a whole room: your knees will tell you. If the subfloor is uneven or the room has a damp problem, fix that first rather than laying over it.

Try these calculators

• Laminate Flooring Calculator — planks, boxes and underlay rolls.
• Flooring Calculator — boxes from room area and coverage per box.
• Square Footage Calculator — room area in square feet and square metres.