How to properly lay the laminate in the apartment

Laminate has long gained popularity as a beautiful, high-quality floor covering a modern apartment. Convenience and ease of work with it allow you to do everything yourself, you just need to know how to properly lay the laminate.

For this, preliminary preparation is necessary, on which the quality of the finished coating depends. It comes down to aligning the base (the old floor). The floor can be wooden or concrete, it is important only to give it an almost perfectly flat plane. All possible means are used for work: they crochet, shpatlyuyut, pierce nails boards, etc.

For wooden floors, this process can be time consuming, so often a layer of chipboard or thick plywood is laid over the floor. The concrete floor is simply aligned if a self-leveling mixture is used. This preparation is necessary, since it is possible to lay the laminate correctly only on a flat surface with a permissible deviation from the ideal plane of not more than two millimeters per meter.

Over it lay a polyethylene film with a thickness of about 200 microns, it serves as a waterproofing. It is lapped, gluing joints with adhesive tape. Note that laminate flooring in an apartment is possible only in dry rooms, it does not tolerate high humidity, for the same reason, a polyethylene film is also used.

The next stage is the device of a substrate made of cork or foam polyethylene. At the same time it serves as additional noise and heat insulation. The substrate will protect the laminate from cracking. The substrate and the film are placed with the allowance on the wall.

After that, you can proceed with the actual installation. How to properly lay the laminate, where to start? Lay it in rows, the first row should be facing the wall with the side on which the spike is located. The spike must be cut with a jig saw or a manual circular. Due to the fact that the laminate can expand with a change in humidity, be sure to leave a gap of 10-15 mm in front of the wall. To do this, insert the restrictive bars between the wall and the first row.

Panels are connected with the use of PVA glues or dry method, for this, insert the thorn of the next panel into the groove at an angle and press it, then punch the panel with a hammer, but necessarily through a bar. The subsequent rows should be placed with some shifting of the row connections (vzrazbezhku), that is, the panels are stacked, as it were, in staggered order with an offset of about 20 cm. To trim the panel, use an electric jig saw or circular saw.

When the entire laminate is laid, on the perimeter of the room we mount the plinth. And we do it so that the plinth presses the laminate to the base. Pre-cut the surplus substrate and waterproofing. This concludes the work. As you can see, the very process of laying is simple, the quality of the coating directly depends on the preparation of the surface. Before you lay the laminate floor, you need to level the floor with your own hands. This is a very important stage.

How to properly lay a laminate: a few tips

• The hole for the riser of the heating pipe is sawed in the panel before laying with a jig saw; Such panels are better to connect by means of glue, and from above to put a special plug.
• Do not use panels with chips and cracks, so you will extend the life of the laminate.
• Try to connect the panels as tightly as possible by hammering, and to avoid damaging the edge, use softwood bars.
• Do not use nails and screws for attaching the laminate to the floor, damage to the plastic coating of the panel leads to its rapid deterioration.
• Do not lay the laminate on the substrate of adhesive.