Steps In Preparing A Room For Installing Cork Flooring

Posted by articlelink01 on January 29th, 2015

Initial preparation steps
Cork flooring provides for a beautiful yet cozy floor that is comfortable and maintains good temperature levels. The task requires one to have the necessary requisite materials and equipment which include pencils, tape measures, electric or any other available kind of saws, adhesive tapes, spacers, set squares and PE films.  Installingcorkflooring follows a set of basic steps which are much easier to follow starting with preparation and proceeds as follows.

During preparation one has to check for vertical trims that need to be chopped away so that the flooring slides comfortably under it. A cork plank is placed at the door ways on top of the saddles then it’s butted on to door stops. The stops are then trimmed with the aid of a backsaw with exception of jambs. The door sides are then joined on top of the saddle. It is important that the saddle be keenly pried up before proceeding with the floor installation. Casings found on the wall beside the door should also be cut and a cork plank can be used to determine how much of them need to be trimmed.

For installations in places such as the kitchen, removal of cabinet toekicks should be undertaken if there is such a possibility to allow the cork flooringto be run under this cabinet. For stationery kicks, the installation of the floor should proceed up to within a limit of a half an inch of the toekick. The resulting gap can then be concealed during the final finishing steps. If the installations are to be done over concrete like the case of basements, it’s important to remove all the baseboard to allow for covering the slab using a polythene sheeting of 6mm which should be run above the wall for up to 3 inches. Such sheeting should then be overlapped by use of 8 inch seams then sealed with some tape.

Taking measurements

Completion of this preparation procedure gives way for plank trimming intended to give way for laying the first course of cork flooring. Laying of the plank should start on the longest wall of the room, assuming it does not have square dimensions and that wall must also be uninterrupted. Using a tape measure, determine the length between this wall and its opposite wall after which one inch is subtracted from the measured distance. Take note that this subtraction is intended to allow for free expansion. The remaining measure is divided using the cork plank’s width as the divisor and the resulting quotient indicates how many courses will be required to adequately cover the available surface.

In case that the end course needs a plank portion that is less than half of the full plank, then the end two courses i.e. the first and the last courses will be slightly narrowed to allow for balancing of the layout. The width of a full plank and that of the last course are summed together and halved which results in a measure of how wide the last and first courses will be. Using the appropriate saw, planks of the first course are adjusted to this width or sawed to get an expansion gap that is unobstructed.

Get more informationabout installing cork flooring andon what you need during the preparation steps for cork flooring can be accessed which provides a clear outline on the needed information along with other advanced details on how to go about the process.