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Dijon Home & Flooring

Acclimatising Your Wood Floor

It is important to appreciate that your new wood floor is a natural product and was living and breathing until a matter of months or even weeks ago; introducing it into a much warmer location, your home, will affect the wood, causing it to expand or contract. Thus it is important to allow the wood to do this before it is fitted – this is the process of acclimatisation.

The need to acclimatise wood flooring, even laminate, is widely know; most manufacturers make this plain on the packaging or installation instructions. However, it isn’t always as straight forward as leaving the flooring in your property for a few days – it is important to take into consideration, not just the temperature, but the humidity and moisture levels in the sub-floor, walls and flooring itself. These are not something that the average do-it-yourselfer or even many carpenters are equipped to check. 

One of the pitfalls of the increasing popularity of real wood floors is that it gives rise to unscrupulous manufacturers who don’t dry the timber to the specified standards; it can either be under-dried, and therefore continue to dry and contract in you home, or over-dried and expand as it takes on moisture to the level in your home. Our most popular flooring - oak - gets harder with age, correctly seasoning and drying accelerates this meaning you get a better quality floor. We can’t emphasise how important it is to purchase a product from a quality manufacturer, who adheres to specified standards for drying.

We have seen many cases where this simple advice was spurned to save a few pounds a metre: The floor looks great when it is first fitted. Then what happens is it starts to slowly expand or contract as it reabsorbs or expels moisture it should have taken on or lost during acclimatisation - this will usually happen over a number of weeks. You are then left with a floor that has expanded to the perimeter of the room and is pushing up, or has gaps where the boards have contracted.

Often fitters will know it needs acclimatising and leave it in the property for a week or two. However, as we have already mentioned, it does depend on the level of moisture in the wood and the property. This is why you should only have a wood floor fitter by experts or with expert advice which we are more than happy to offer.



We have hundreds of satisfied customers who have bought solid wood, hard wood, engineered wood, laminate flooring, natural stone flooring, under floor heating, carpet, and more and had it installed or fitted by us in Birmingham, Bournemouth, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Cheltenham, Edinburgh, Henley on Thames, Kingston Upon Thames, Lichfield, London, Manchester, Nottingham, Oxford, Poole, Solihull, Stratford-on-Avon, Sutton Coldfield, Warwick, and Worcester.

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