Solid Wood Flooring in Leicester

A solid board in Leicester means Stoneygate, Knighton and Clarendon Park: Victorian and Edwardian houses on suspended timber over a ventilated void, with the room heights to carry a Windsor plank and owners who will sand it back rather than replace it. The moisture in the void is read before the boards are ordered, and the boards spend their fortnight in the room before the tongue-and-groove goes down over the joists or a plywood deck.

In New Walk and Stoneygate the conservation designation may protect the original floor, and restoring it is then the honest solid-wood job. Elsewhere the exclusions are the usual ones: the slab of a Beaumont Leys house and the heated screed at Ashton Green both call for the engineered range, and with nearly a third of the city renting privately and two universities filling the LE1 and LE2 lets, a landlord’s floor is the engineered or vinyl one, not the solid.

With semi-detached houses at 36% of the Leicester stock, the common layout in Leicester is a timber front room and a concrete kitchen. Solid oak suits the first and not the second: it is fixed to timber, not to a slab, and it should stop at the door to the extension. Where the whole ground floor is concrete, an engineered board is the honest recommendation, and the guide linked below says why.

Terraced houses are 29% of the homes in the Leicester district, and a terrace is where solid oak is at home: the original floor was solid timber on joists, and a new solid board is fixed the same way, nailed or screwed through the tongue into the joists or a ply overlay. The 90 mm Windsor Narrow boards suit the proportions of a terraced front room. What the terrace needs first is a dry, ventilated void underneath, because solid timber follows the moisture of the air around it.