Fitting Ideas of Your Oak Floorboards

Fitting your hardwood flooring, whether it is a solid wood floor or an engineered oak hardwood floor depends on many factors. You can use specialist glues, secret nails, big old-fashioned nails or some hardwood floor can be kept as a floating floor depending on whether your boards come end-matched and have been correctly machined.

Firstly, for any hardwood floor, antique oak floor and most oak floorboards in general you have to consider the floor itself, the supporting timbers or the sub-floor. You will not be able to correct any foundations irregularities once your hardwood floor has been fitting, so it is vital that the base is solid and flat. All hardwood floors, antique oak floors, oak floorboards are a natural product and thus oak floorboard movement is possible even when fitted, if you have an unstable base that supports your hardwood floor, then you will have additional potential problems such as boards lifting, creaking, working themselves lose. If you have carefully revised your hardwood floor base and supporting timbers then you are ready to fit your hardwood floor, antique oak floor, and oak floorboards.

Let’s assume that your hardwood floor design suits a modern and clean finish and you would prefer the nails to be hidden. Then the method of fitting would be secret nailing or gluing. If you are fitting your hardwood floor onto joists then you will not be able to float your hardwood floor, not matter if it is solid oak, engineered oak, antique oak, new oak floorboards. Fitting directly onto joists is the most traditional of methods and we would advise you to nail the boards using old and traditional clasp nails. On the other hand, you can screw your hardwood floor to the joists and fill the screw holes with filler, even better use your hardwood flooring scraps to make bespoke oak pegs that can be used to hide the unsightly screw holes and screw heads. If however, you have fitted a sub-floor of plywood to your joists and you do not have a flat and strong base for your hardwood floor, only now are you ready to float your hardwood floor, glue your hardwood floor or secret nail your hardwood floor.

If you choose to float your hardwood floor, then you will need to secret nail the tongues and the grooved of each oak floorboard to the next. One the hardwood floor has been fitted and secret nailed together, you will be left with a few mm of free space surround the whole hardwood floor surface. This is important so that your floor has space to ‘breath’, if there is to be any oak floorboard movement over the coming years this extra free space acts as added stability.

If you choose to glue your hardwood floor, this is the most popular method and the fastest way to fit your oak floorboards. You cannot glue a reclaimed hardwood oak floor; you can only glue a new hardwood floor with relief grooves beneath. This is because reclaimed hardwood floors require additional fitting pressure and adjustments when fitting, this is their charm and authenticity, these so called ‘imperfections’ will make this type of floor unique unlike and new oak hardwood floors.