Increasingly popular during repair, when designing an apartment design, the floor with a laminate is gaining ground, replacing the more familiar board or parquet. But with all the seeming simplicity of the work, a completely natural question arises - how to lay a laminate flooring without special knowledge and skills? To help you with this, consider the main stages of its installation.
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 installation of the floor covering will be carried out, for a couple of days to adapt the material to the temperature and humidity 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 from boards (old plank floor).
To begin, consider how to put a laminate on concrete. It is necessary to check the horizontality of the base, using the building level for this, and make sure that there are no differences exceeding 2 mm, sagging, potholes. If necessary, these defects must be eliminated with a tool or by pouring a self-leveling concrete mixture.
Then waterproofing is laid on the base to protect the floor from condensation. To do this, you can use an ordinary film of polyethylene, and overlaps at the joints when laying it 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 in a large assortment at specialized retail outlets. At the joints, the insulators are fastened with construction tape.
How to lay a laminate in relation to daylight? In order for the lateral joints of the floor not to be 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 two types of locks - with locks “Lock” and “Click”. How to lay laminate flooring with various 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 locking the lock. When laying panels with “Lock” locks, the previous and subsequent panels are located horizontally relative to each other and with a light tapping of the hammer, the spike is driven into the groove. In both the first and second cases, for more durable fastening of panel locks and better waterproofing, you can use water-repellent glue, which is applied to the lock spike, after which the lock is latched, as described above.
Start laying the first row nkzhno from the far left corner of the room with a temperature-deformation gap from the wall. The clearance should be at least 10 mm. The second row begins 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 end locks fit in a checkerboard pattern to distribute the loads on the laminate panel. Then the subsequent rows are stacked.
How to put a laminate on a wooden floor? The only thing that distinguishes laying it on the floor from boards from laying on concrete or sand-cement mix is the preparation of the base for installation of the coating. The wooden floor needs to be looped with an electric plane or grinder, fasten the boards with screws, eliminating squeaks, replace the boards in rotten or damaged places. Further, the process is similar to laying a laminate on a concrete base.