Laying Parquet Flooring In Herringbone Pattern

The fitting process involved a lot more than it looks at first site. We also had to remove old skirting boards and install new ones, include liquid DPM (damage proof membrane), perform door frame trimming, and finally add thresholds.

At the beginning of our visit, we discovered that the original floors were already removed for reasons unknown. What we found was a bare subfloor which after some cleaning and preparation would be able to accept the brand new surface which is about to be laid on top of it.

We had a herringbone parquet floor to install. The most obvious first step was to ask the client in which direction the herringbone should run. In most cases, it is best to let it be parallel to the longest pair of walls in the room but the customer may have other ideas. Once we know what are his preferences, we can draw a snap line in the centre of the room, take some very needed measurements to find out the distance between the corner of the slats and start laying the first row.

The parquet can be either nailed or glued down and in this case, we simply nailed it without adding an adhesive. The laying of each piece must be done precisely and carefully. We certainly put effort into this. Don’t we always?  Row after row, after double checking, if the blocks are fitted correctly, we completed the fitting. However, this was not all.

Sanding a parquet floor is not among the easiest types of restoration because of the very nature of parquetry. Rule number one when sanding a floor is to follow to grain which, in this case, simply isn’t possible. No matter what, one side of the blocks will suffer cross-grain scratching unless we sand diagonally. With the help of our professional dust-free sanding equipment manufactured by Bona, we had little problem doing this. All that was left was to fill any gaps left with a floor filler and apply the finish. What we used to seal the surface was our favourite Junckers HP Commercial. Not even 3 but four coats of it for that extra level of protection.