More and more popular during the renovation, when designing an apartment, the floor with a laminate is gaining, replacing the more familiar plank or parquet. But with all the seeming simplicity of the work, a completely natural question arises - how to lay a laminate without special knowledge and skills? To help you with this, let's look at the main steps for laying it.
So, how to lay a laminate with your own hands? First of all, it is necessary to bring the purchased panels into the room where the flooring will be installed for a couple of days to adapt the material to temperature and humidity in order to avoid deformation of the panels after installation. In these couple of days, you can start preparing the base on which the laminate flooring will be laid. The base can be concrete (sand-cement screed) or boards (old plank floor).
First, let's look at how to put laminate on concrete. It is necessary to check the horizontalness of the base, using a constructionlevel, and make sure that there are no drops exceeding 2 mm, sagging, potholes. If necessary, these defects must be repaired with a tool or self-levelling concrete grout.
Then, waterproofing is laid on the base to protect the floor from condensation. To do this, you can use an ordinary polyethylene film, and the overlaps at the joints during its laying are made at least 200 mm. On top of the waterproofing laid on a concrete base, it is recommended to lay a special heat insulator for floor insulation, which is available in a large assortment at specialized outlets. At the joints, the insulators are fastened with construction tape.
How to lay the laminate in relation to daylight? In order for the side joints of the floor not to be very noticeable, it spreads perpendicular to the wall on which the windows or most of them are located.
After preparing and laying the insulators, we proceed to the assembly of the panels. Their connections are with locks of two types - with locks "Lock" and "Click". How to lay laminate with different locks? When assembling the cover with “Click” locks, each next panel is inserted into the previous one at an angle of 30 ° C, after which it is pressed against the floor with force, thereby snapping the lock. When laying panels with “Lock” locks, the previous and subsequent panels are placed horizontally relative to each other and the spike is driven into the groove with a light tap of the hammer. Both in the first and in the second case for a stronger fastening of the panel locks and better waterproofingyou can use water-repellent glue, which is applied to the latch of the lock, after which the lock snaps into place, as indicated above.
Start laying the first row from the far left corner of the room with a temperature-deformation gap from the wall. The gap must be at least 10 mm. The second row starts with a section of the panel with a length of at least 300 mm, to which the next panel is joined. This is done so that the locks of the end connections lie in a checkerboard pattern to distribute loads on the laminate panels. Then the subsequent rows are laid.
How to put laminate flooring on wood floor? The only thing that distinguishes laying it on the floor from the boards from laying it on concrete or sand-cement mixture is the preparation of the base for the installation of the coating. The wooden floor needs to be cycled with an electric planer or grinder, fix the boards with self-tapping screws, eliminating squeaks, replace the boards in rotten or damaged places. Further, the process is similar to laying a laminate on a concrete base.
