Keeping your wits about widths
02 November 2009
When
you need to determine the size of the expansion gap you have to keep
around the whole perimeter of the floor, there are a few "rules of thumb".
Specially with Solid Oak flooring: 3 - 4 mm gap per meter width of the
room. Why? Because that is how much per meter wide Solid Oak can expand
during the seasonal changes in air humidity.
It does sound like a simple and easy to follow "rule".
Until we received a phone call last week from a desperate DIY-er. He
had kept himself to the rule, his room was 4 meters wide and had kept
an expansion gaps all around of 18mm but the Solid Oak boards (secretly
nailed directly on to joists) had started to lift up in two areas. What
could be the reason for this, he had checked for leaks and hadn't found
anything suspicious.


never install Solid Oak floorboards in a room wider than 6 meter without adding extra expansion gaps (by ways of installing thresholds or flat dividers in the most logical places, for instances where two rooms have been knocked into one and still have "pillars" or small parts of the old wall)
So, keep your wits about widths and realise that with installing wooden floors the actual width of the room sometimes has to be measured along the length of the room, it all depends on how you are installing your floorboards: lengthways or widthways!
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