Laminate Flooring in Coventry

Coventry’s twentieth century left it two tranches of solid-floor housing, the inter-war semis and the post-war reconstruction, and laminate was more or less designed for them: a floating floor over a slab, quick to lay, one look through lounge, hall and dining room for a Cheylesmore or Binley family. Upstairs the same board runs through the bedrooms, where the underlay beneath it does a second job, softening the footfall that the living room below would otherwise hear through a suspended first floor.

The hall is where a Coventry laminate earns or loses its keep. Terraced halls in Earlsdon and Chapelfields push heavy traffic through a narrow width, and if the budget stretches to a higher wear rating anywhere, it stretches there; those terraces are also on Victorian timber, which is levelled before the boards go down. Wet rooms are not laminate’s territory, so the kitchen and the bathroom take the BML rigid vinyl, and at Spon End and City Centre South, where the screed is heated, the boards are listed as compatible with it.

Terraced houses are 40% of the homes in the Coventry district, and laminate is the floor most often laid through them: a click floor floats over the old suspended boards on an underlay, and the whole ground floor of a terrace can be done in a weekend. The condition is the base. Loose or springy boards are screwed down first, and the underlay chosen for a timber floor is one without a vapour barrier, so the void beneath can breathe.

Private renting is 25% of households in Coventry, and laminate is the landlord's floor in Coventry for the plain reason that it is the quickest to replace between tenancies and the least costly to replace. An AC4 rating carries domestic wear; the rooms that suffer are the ones with water, and there the rigid-vinyl range takes over.