Internal Finishes: Floor Covers

ABOVE: Junckers’ solid wood Black Oak Harmony

Nowhere else in building is there such a great variety of materials at such a huge variation in price. You could floor a four bedroom house for less than £1,000 (incl VAT); equally you could spend over £10,000 and not risk being accused of extravagance. The main options are:

Carpet

Even when glued down, carpet is regarded as a movable item and therefore subject to VAT as a furnishing — all other types of floor finish are zero rated in the UK and therefore effectively exempt from VAT when built into a new house. Even so, carpeting still provides potentially the cheapest form of floor covering available — especially the bonded cords, which also happen to be reasonably hard-wearing.

Tiles

There are many different materials used to tile or sheet floors and there is not space to cover them all here. Broadly speaking, they split into two main categories: soft and hard. Soft tiles include all manner of synthetics like vinyl and plastics, through to natural materials like cork and rubber. They can also include a number of convincing wood and stone imitation products. Hard tiles are generally ceramic, although they can also be natural stone or concrete. It’s a popular option in kitchens, bathrooms and utility rooms and goes especially well with underfloor heating, as the material acts as a heat transmitter.

Price wise, it is difficult to generalise. Tiles of all materials are available across a wide range of prices. For instance, vinyl can be very cheap, or high quality and expensive.

Top Tiles

Create the perfect tiled floor

1. Marlborough Tumbled Limestone from Mandarin Stone;
2. Emerald Pearl tiles from Original Style;
3. Terracotta Hex tiles from Bodj
4. Marmoleum checkerboard tiles from Forbo

Timber

Timber flooring, hardwood in particular, has become something close to a self-build must-have in the past decade or so. Just as with other flooring options, there is a wide range of prices here, from softwood floor planks (which require a fair amount of onsite treatment to make them last) through to pre-finished hardwoods. Oak flooring, for instance, appears to be available from anywhere between £15 and £80/m². There are also a number of engineered floors around: these place a thick veneer of natural timber on top of an MDF backing sheet, which gives rather more stability than you get with natural timber planking on its own.

Timber floors have to be laid carefully and care has to be taken to ensure that the floor below has totally dried out: a cement screed takes upwards of two months to dry.

The Wonder of Wood

The classic flooring choice in both natural and wood-look options

1. Dinesen’s pine boards are extra wide and long;
2. Structural engineered Zebrano from The Natural Wood Floor Company;
3. Stonewoods’ Light Oak;
4. Quickstep’s laminate Harvest Oak Planks

Screeds

Another factor to consider is the screed — the layer that is usually applied between the concrete floor and the finished floor cover. In traditional builds, the screed is applied by the plasterers as part of the plastering-out phase: it’s a dryish mix of sand and cement, applied at a thickness of around 75mm. If you have underfloor heating, it’s conventionally laid within the screed layer. Screeding is a skilled art and it is easy to get it wrong, so there has been a lot of interest in alternative screed systems, and in the last few years we have seen the arrival of a number of selflevelling gypsum-based screed systems which are pumped through hoses. These gypsum screeds are more expensive than cement screeds but only have to be 50mm thick, which makes them overall about the same price.

They can also be used on timber floors (with a certain amount of adaptation) which makes them ideally suited to people wanting underfloor heating upstairs, or wanting a better sound-proofing detail for their floors in a timber frame house.

Normally a timber floor is constructed dry — that is to say there are no wet trades involved. Whilst this is easy (and relatively cheap), underfloor heating pipes have to be fixed from below which is a difficult and painstaking task.

Further reading:

• Wall and Ceiling Finishes
• Staircases, Doors and Mouldings

Return to The 12 Steps of Self-build: Internal Finishes