Three Installation Methods Your Flooring Pro Might Use

Laying flooring, no matter the type, is a lot more complicated than simply unrolling spools of the stuff—that’s why you should hire a floor care pro to do the job! In addition to the complexity of the process as a whole, mistakes can cost you greatly in terms of both stress and money, as not all flooring types are forgiving of amateur errors.

To give you a better idea of what we mean, check out the blog post below. There, we’ll delve into just a few flooring installation methods in detail—the skills they require, the flooring types they might be used with, and just what your pro will need to do to get the job done.

Floating Flooring

Rest assured this flooring type will stay firmly on the ground! Floating flooring simply refers to flooring that isn’t glued, nailed, or otherwise attached to the subfloor beneath it—“Individual planks (or in some cases tiles) interlock edge-to-edge to form a single mat-like surface that simply rests on the underlayment,” as The Spruce puts it. It can be used with a variety of flooring types, from hardwood floors to vinyl.

Though it appears to be a relatively simple flooring installation method, in some senses this is quite deceiving. Your subfloor must be ready to rock and roll in absolutely every sense, or you could risk an uneven job—and getting that ready can be a job in and of itself.

Nail-Down Flooring

A common method for hardwood flooring, nailing down a floor is pretty much self-explanatory: planks are nailed into the subfloor in such a way that the metal bits are left invisible after the installation is done. Though it’s often used with solid hardwood floors, engineered hardwood flooring may also be laid with this method.

Nail-down flooring comes with an important caveat: it can only be attached to a wooden subfloor, not cement ones. It’s therefore not a fit for every project!

Glue-Down Flooring

When using this method, your floor installation pro will use a specially designed adhesive to attach your flooring to the subfloor. It’s quite forgiving when it comes to both subfloor material and slope, and it’s preferred by a wide variety of flooring pros. Equally as wide is the quantity of flooring types this method can be used with—everything from hardwood to vinyl floors cooperates with it nicely.

U.B. Hardwoods: Wood Floors, Vinyl, and More

For all the latest installation tips and a team that’s excited to help you on your flooring quest, contact U.B. Hardwoods today. Reach our Plymouth office now at 763-807-4500.