Increasingly popular with repair, withdesign of the apartment is gaining floor with laminate, replacing the more familiar board or parquet floor. But with all the seeming simplicity of the works, a completely natural question arises: how to lay a laminate without having special knowledge and skills? To help you in this, let us consider the main stages of its laying.
So, how to put a laminate on your own?First of all, it is necessary to bring the purchased panels to the room where the floor covering will be installed, for a couple of days to adapt the material to the temperature regime and humidity in order to avoid deformation of the panels after laying. In these couple of days, you can do the preparation of the foundation, on which the laminate flooring will be laid. The base can be concrete (sand-cement screed) or from boards (old plank floor).
First, let's look at how to put a laminate onconcrete. It is necessary to check the horizontality of the base, using the building level for this, and make sure there are no drops exceeding 2 mm, rips, potholes. If necessary, these defects must be removed with the help of a tool or with a gravy of a self-leveling concrete mix.
Then the waterproofing forpreventing the floor from condensation. To do this, you can use an ordinary film of polyethylene, and overlapping at the joints when it is laid, at least 200 mm are made. On top of the waterproofing laid on the concrete base, it is recommended to lay a special heat insulator for floor insulation, which in a large range is available in specialized outlets. At the junctions, the insulators are fastened with a construction tape.
How to put laminate flooring in relation to daylight? To ensure that the side joints of the floor are not strongly visible, it spreads perpendicular to the wall on which the windows or most of them are located.
After preparation and packing of insulators we pass toassembly of panels. Their connections come with locks of two types - with locks "Lock" and "Click". How to put a laminate with different locks? When assembling the cover with the "Click" locks, each next panel is inserted into the previous one at an angle of 30 ° C, then presses against the floor with a force, thereby snapping the lock. When stacking panels with locks "Lock", the previous and subsequent panels are positioned horizontally with respect to each other and with an easy tapping of the hammer, the spike is pushed into the groove. And in the first and second case, for more durable fastening of the panel locks and better waterproofing, you can use water-repellent glue, which is applied to the lock spike, after which the lock snaps into place, as indicated above.
Begin laying the first row from the farthe left corner of the room with a temperature-deformation gap from the wall. The gap should not be less than 10 mm. The second row starts with a piece of panel 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 staggered order to distribute the loads on the laminate panels. Then the next rows fit.
How to put a laminate on a wooden floor?The only thing that distinguishes its laying on the floor from the boards from laying on concrete or sand-cement mixture is the preparation of the base for the installation of the coating. The wooden floor needs to be recycled using an electric gun or a sanding machine, fix the boards with screws, removing squeaks, replacing boards in rotten or damaged places. Further, the process is similar to laying a laminate on a concrete foundation.
