What Fitting Day Actually Looks Like

Most people have never watched a carpet go down and assume it's a case of rolling it out flat. It isn't. Gripper goes round the perimeter first, then underlay, then the carpet is power-stretched onto the gripper pins to keep it drum-tight for years rather than rippling within months.

Ask any fitter which room they least want on a Friday afternoon and most will say the stairs. Every tread is measured individually, winders are cut on the diagonal by hand, and the whole run has to look centred from the bottom step to the top even where the staircase itself isn't perfectly square.

Herringbone is unforgiving. Get the first few rows out of true and the error compounds visibly across the room, so before a single board is glued or clicked down we chalk a centre line, dry-lay a run of blocks against it and check it square against at least two walls, not just one.

Unlike sheet vinyl or glue-down tiles, click LVT isn't fixed to the subfloor at all — it floats as one interlocking sheet, similar to laminate. That means subfloor prep still matters enormously, because any dip or high spot telegraphs through and can affect how well the clicking joints lock together over time.

Full-bond LVT is glued directly to the subfloor rather than floated, which gives a firmer underfoot feel and suits areas that see a lot of wheeled traffic or heavy furniture. It also demands a much flatter, better-prepared subfloor than a floating floor, because every imperfection is bonded permanently in place.

It surprises a lot of customers that a solid-looking floor needs room to move at all, but timber and vinyl-based products expand and contract with heat and moisture through the year. A small gap left around the perimeter, later hidden under skirting or scotia, gives that movement somewhere to go without the floor buckling.

The little strip of metal or wood under a doorway rarely gets a second glance, but it's doing real work: covering the expansion gap of a floating floor, bridging a height difference between two different flooring types, and stopping a carpet edge from fraying where it meets a hard floor.

Once a floating floor is down there's still a visible gap running round every wall, and this final stage is about covering it neatly rather than fitting the floor itself. Depending on the room we'll either refit your existing skirting, fit new skirting, or run a slim scotia bead if the skirting's staying put.

Before any new flooring goes down, whatever was there before needs to come up, and that's included in our quote rather than billed separately. Old carpet gets rolled and bagged, gripper is prised up and binned, and hard flooring like laminate or vinyl is lifted board by board or in sheets depending on how it was originally fitted.

A fitting day runs to time largely because of things that have nothing to do with the flooring itself — a clear path from the front door, somewhere for the van to park, and furniture that's either out of the room or light enough for us to shift safely between rooms while we work.

Timber is a natural material that keeps responding to its environment long after it's been milled into a plank, expanding and contracting with moisture in the air. Delivering it straight from a cold warehouse and fitting it the same day risks it moving after installation, so we get it into the room in advance to settle.

The honest answer to 'how long will this take' depends entirely on the flooring type, the room count and what's underneath the old floor, but there are realistic ranges. A single room is usually a matter of hours, while a full house with several floor types can run across a number of days.