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Parquet can be glued down or floated, laid straight or in herringbone – and those choices change how much you buy and how you set out. This guide walks through it step by step, and shows you how to work out the exact board count and waste for your pattern first.
Work out your material first →With parquet it is the pattern that drives the cost: herringbone and other decorative lays waste far more than a straight one, so the first thing to get right is how much to order. Draw your room in the free planner, pick your pattern, and it counts the boards and the waste for your actual floor – then follow the six steps below to lay it.
Wood moves with the room it lives in, so let the boxes lie flat and unopened in the room for a few days to settle to its temperature and humidity before you start. Meanwhile work out the quantity: a herringbone or other pattern wastes far more than a straight lay, so draw the room in the free planner, choose your pattern and let it count the boards and the waste for you.
The base must be clean, flat and – above all – dry. Take a CM (calcium carbide) moisture reading of the screed; solid parquet and underfloor heating in particular demand a dry, stable subfloor, because wood laid over a damp base cups and gaps. Fill low spots with levelling compound and let them cure fully.
Full-surface adhesive bonds every board to the subfloor and is the right choice for solid parquet and for floors over underfloor heating, where it gives the best heat transfer and the calmest surface. Engineered boards with a click profile can instead float on an impact-sound underlay, without glue – faster to lay, but a little more resonant underfoot.
For herringbone, don't start at a wall: strike a centre line down the room and build the pattern symmetrically to it, so the two halves mirror and the offcuts fall at the edges. For straight planks, pick the laying direction first – usually towards the daylight, so the joints catch less light and the boards read as one surface.
Glue or click each board to the last, keeping the pattern tight, and stagger the end joints from row to row so no two seams line up. Start each new row with the offcut from the previous one wherever its length allows – with herringbone especially, feeding the offcuts back in is what keeps the waste down.
If the wood is raw, sand it flat and then oil or seal it; pre-finished boards need only a clean. Keep the expansion gap to every wall and fixed edge – parquet expands and contracts with the seasons – then pull the spacers and cover the gap with skirting boards, never screwed through the boards.
Herringbone and decorative lays make waste hard to guess. Instead of area × a rule-of-thumb factor, the free planner places every board at real dimensions for your chosen pattern, counts the cut pieces and gives you the exact board count and waste for your room.
Open the free planner →