Timber flooring installation across Sydney

Most flooring failures are not laid on the day the boards go down. They are laid weeks earlier, in a subfloor that was never properly checked, or in a pack of timber that went straight from a cold truck onto a warm slab. We work the other way around: measure, test, record, then install.

Every job is carried out or directly supervised by the owner, working to a set-out agreed before anything is ordered. One point of accountability from the measure through to the handover walk-through.

What a proper installation involves

Every floor is different, but the sequence rarely changes. Skipping any of these is how a floor ends up cupping, gapping or peaking two summers later.

The sequence

• On-site measure, with the set-out direction agreed before anything is ordered.
• Subfloor assessment — flatness checked against a straight edge, moisture read with a meter, and any movement or damp identified in writing before we commit to a date.
• Delivery and acclimatisation. Boards are stacked in the room they will live in, not in the garage, and left until their moisture content sits close to the in-service equilibrium of that building.
• Preparation — levelling compound, ply overlay or moisture barrier as the substrate requires. Quoted separately, always, because nobody can price this honestly from a photo.
• Installation to the manufacturer’s system, using the adhesive or underlay that product’s warranty actually requires.
• Trims, transitions and skirting, then a clean site and a walk-through before we ask for the balance.

Moisture is the whole game

Timber is hygroscopic: it takes on and gives off moisture until it reaches equilibrium with the air around it. At 25°C and 60% relative humidity that equilibrium sits near 11% moisture content. At 25°C and 80% it is closer to 16%. A floor laid at one and living at the other will move, and no fixing method stops it.

Sydney makes this sharper than most cities. A house four hundred metres from the water at Newport behaves differently to one in Frenchs Forest, and a west-facing apartment with full-height glass behaves differently again. So we take readings rather than assume, and we write them down. If the numbers say wait, we wait — that conversation is much cheaper than the one about a cupped floor.

Fixing method, and why it matters to you

Floating over an acoustic underlay is faster, cheaper, reversible, and the sensible default for most apartments. Direct-stick — glued to the substrate — feels and sounds more solid underfoot, is required for most solid timber, and demands a much flatter and drier subfloor. Which one is right depends on the substrate, the product, the acoustic requirement and how the room is used.

We will tell you which one your job needs and why, including when the cheaper option is the better one.

At a glance