Click-It Flooring

We had a great deal of trouble trying to choose an ensuite bathroom flooring material. Well, in fact, we have had a great deal of trouble with the bathroom, full stop, but more of that later when I have plucked up the courage to write about it and fully convey the horror.......

I digress - in the end we opted not for carpet (too susceptible to getting wet), not for stone tiles (too cold) but for a cork flooring (natural eco-friendly) mounted on an HDF backing board (not so eco-friendly). HDF = High Density Fibreboard i.e. big brother of that reality TV home makeover show's favourite, MDF.

Each board is rectangular at around 30cm x 90cm, and is tongued and grooved with a precision machine cut moulding that allows adjacent planks to "click" together and lock into a tight joint. First, we laid out the first row, without joining them :

This flooring is not designed to attach in any way to the supporting sub-floor. It just floats there with no glue, nails or screws to hold it in place. I have to say I was quite sceptical about this, and expected it to bounce and creak, but it doesn't. A 10mm gap is left around the edges to allow for expansion (strange one this - most timber products are subject to shrinkage) but this will be covered by the skirting board.

Our first attempts to follow the instructions and "simply push the planks together until they click into place" was unsuccessful. A little more force than that is required, resulting in the use of a scrap end of timber and a wooden mallet. To do the second row is even harder as the long edges are "clicked" but then the new plank has to be knocked along until the short edges also engage. We even resorted to spraying the "tongues" with furniture polish to make it slide easier (it didn't really help).

Of course, the real difficulty lies with he last plank, where you have no way of tapping the plank because the wall is in the way. This is where the "pull bar" comes into play. Here are the two most useful tools of the day :

The pull bar is just a bent piece of metal which hooks over the end of the last plank and gives you a hitting surface at the other end. I thought I could get away with not using this (just on the basis of reading the instructions, "simply click ..". It is not true. If you are laying this kind of flooring you cannot do without a pull-bar. In the end we used it for making all the joints, not just the end ones. I didn't even have to buy mine. Once I realised I needed one, I posted a request on my local freecycle email group, and had received one, on loan from someone a mile away, within the hour.

Before long, the job was done, including the slightly tricky cutouts around the radiator pipes :

The gap in the middle is where the bath is going, and saved the purchase of another pack of 6 planks, just to give us the two that we needed. In fact there would have been two spare anyway, but this was reduced to one when I tried to cut the last plank to size in the dark, and got it wrong.