Floor laying and tiling in Nieuwegein

What a floor ends up costing, and how long it stays tight, is almost never decided by the floor itself. It is decided by what sits underneath it. Laminate, vinyl and tiles are three different products with three different ways of laying, but they share one property: they never come out flatter than the surface they go on. Below you can read, per floor, where the work sits, what drives the price, and when you are better off choosing something else.

Levelling is not an optional line

Levelling means pouring a thin layer over your existing screed so that it comes out flat. It is the most crossed-out line on a flooring quote, for an understandable reason: it is the only part you see nothing of once the job is done. You pay for something that disappears invisibly under your new floor.

Even so, in most houses I walk into it is the most important step. What goes wrong if you skip it differs per type of floor, but it always goes wrong in the same place: where the floor sits hollow.

With click floors, so laminate and click vinyl, the floor rests on the high points and hangs above the low ones. Walk across it and the plank flexes, and the click joint works a little bit every time. First you hear it, then you see it: joints opening up, edges lifting, a floor that creaks on exactly that one spot in front of the sofa.

With glued vinyl it is more merciless. That material is thin and follows the substrate exactly. Every bump and every trowel line of adhesive that was not pulled flat will show. In raking light from a window or a lamp you see it without pity.

With tiles it breaks. A tile that is not fully bedded in the adhesive sounds hollow when you tap it, and it is a crack waiting for a heavy chair leg or a dropped pan. With large tile formats that goes double, because they do not bridge a void, they snap over it.

When it is not needed

I do not level as a matter of course just because it happens to be on the list. I lay a long straight edge across the floor in several places and look at where the light comes through underneath. If a smooth concrete screed or a tidy sand-cement floor is already flat, I drop that line and it does not appear on your quote.

There is also a case where levelling is exactly the wrong answer: a timber subfloor. You do not pour levelling compound over that, because timber moves and the layer cracks. A timber floor that is not flat, you make flat with sheet material screwed down onto the joists or onto the existing boards. In pre-war houses that is the normal scenario, and that step then simply belongs in the budget.

Laying laminate

Laminate floats. It is not connected to the substrate, only to itself, through the click along the sides. That makes it fast to lay and possible to take up again later, but it sets two conditions: the substrate has to be flat, and the floor needs room to move on every side. That expansion gap along the walls, the door frames and the pipes is not optional. If the floor is pinched anywhere it will lift, and you do not fix that with a heavier skirting.

Where the time goes is not the middle of the room. Laying whole planks in a row goes quickly. The time goes into the edges: undercutting door frames so the floor runs on underneath instead of stopping against them with an ugly trim, drilling out radiator pipes neatly, planing the last row to size, and the stairs if they are part of it.

That is also the answer to the question of what laying laminate costs. It is not a fixed amount per square metre. A rectangular bedroom with one door is a different rate per metre than a hallway with a staircase, three doors and a meter cupboard, even if the square metres are the same. So when I measure up I count the obstacles, not just the surface area.

Laying it yourself or having it laid

Honest answer, even though it costs me work: a straight room with few obstacles and a substrate that is already flat, you can do that yourself perfectly well. Click flooring was invented to be laid by the owner. Buy some extra material for cutting waste, stick to the expansion gap and take your time over the last row.

Have it done as soon as one of these things is in play. The subfloor has to be made flat first, because then the real work sits in the part you have no experience with. There is a staircase involved, because covering a staircase is precision work and you only get one go at the material. You want glued vinyl or tiles, where a mistake cannot be undone. Or it is several rooms that have to line up, because then the laying direction and the starting point in one room decide how the other one looks.

If you want to do most of it yourself and only farm out the tricky bit, that works too. One room, the stairs or just the preparation falls under small jobs and maintenance with me.

Laying a vinyl floor

Vinyl is the floor most enquiries are about, and the floor where most people do not know that there are two very different versions.

Click vinyl works like laminate: floating, on an underlay, with a click edge. Quick to lay, possible to take up again, and suitable if you do not know yet whether you will be here long. The click edge is the weak spot though. It is thinner than on laminate and it only keeps water out if it sits tight everywhere.

Glued vinyl is laid fully into the adhesive on the screed. That makes it quieter, it feels more solid underfoot, it can run across large areas without trouble and it works better with underfloor heating. It is also the version I recommend when water is in play, in a kitchen or a toilet for example. The price of laying vinyl is higher for the glued version, and that is not down to the adhesive but to the preparation: the substrate has to be genuinely flat and genuinely dry before the first plank goes on.

For a bathroom my advice stays tiles. Vinyl can go in there, but the junctions at the shower, the wall and the drain are exactly the places where water finds its way. How I handle that is on the page about bathroom and sanitary work.

Tiling on floors and walls

Tiling is the only one of the three where most of the work happens before anything is laid. I set the room out first: where does the first whole tile start, where does the cut piece fall, and which line do you see when you walk into the room. That starting point decides the whole picture. Just start in a corner and you are left with a strip of a few centimetres on the other side, right in your line of sight.

Wall tiles ask for the same discipline, with one extra condition: the grout lines have to run through with the floor or deliberately break away from it, because half running through always looks wrong. What that looks like in real life you can see on the tiled kitchen splashback and on this fully tiled bathroom. What you get when floor and wall are set out as one plane is shown well by the open walk-in shower.

Smaller tiling work is just as much part of it. Replacing a loose or cracked tile, regrouting a joint that has gone grey and powdery, or cutting out a bead of sealant that is going black and setting a fresh one. That last one is no luxury: a failed bead of sealant is the most underrated cause of damp damage behind a wall.

Underlays, and what they do and do not do

An underlay beneath a floating floor does three useful things. It keeps damp from the screed out, it dampens impact sound to the neighbours below, and it takes up very small irregularities.

What it does not do is pull a wavy floor straight. That is the misunderstanding I run into most. A thicker, softer underlay that has to swallow a bump gets pressed in right there, and then the click joint starts working in the place where it may work least. An underlay is an addition to a flat substrate, not a replacement for one.

If you live in a flat with an owners’ association (VvE), ask before you buy anything which sound requirement they apply to a hard floor. That decides which underlay you are allowed to use, and it is annoying to find that out once the material is already in the house.

Underfloor heating and which floor can go over it

Underfloor heating changes the ranking. Heat has to get through, and anything that insulates works against you.

Tiles are the best at this. Ceramic conducts heat well, stays dimensionally stable and sits fully in the adhesive on the screed. Glued vinyl comes next, for the same reason: direct contact, no layer of air. Click vinyl and laminate can usually work, but then with an underlay suitable for underfloor heating, and only if the supplier of that specific floor allows it. Ask that and get it on paper. Solid timber is the hardest combination, because it moves with damp and temperature and can open up shrinkage gaps.

If the underfloor heating is still to come, the order matters. If it gets routed into the existing screed, that screed has to be repaired and levelled afterwards before anything can go over it. That is not a setback, it is a normal step, as long as it is in the planning up front. If this hangs off a bigger job, I pick it up in the complete renovation of the room, so that the floor, the heating and the finish wait for each other in the right order instead of running through each other.

Where I work and how it goes

Nieuwegein is my base and that is where most of the flooring and tiling work comes from. Besides that I work in the rest of the region, including Utrecht, where the older housing stock means the preparation more often weighs heavier than the floor itself.

The practical side is simple. Send a few photos of the room and of the existing floor, and say which floor you have in mind. I come and measure up, put the straight edge on it and tell you what the substrate needs before we talk about material. After that you get a quote with the preparation and the laying set out separately, so you see exactly what you are paying for. Questions or doubts about which floor suits your room? Put it to me through the contact page, and I will think it over with you before you order anything.