Engineered Oak Herringbone in a Period Sitting Room

Project overview

The brief

The owners of a period semi in Amersham were redecorating their main sitting room and wanted to lift the original pine boards out and replace them with an engineered oak herringbone — something that suited the cast-iron Victorian fireplace, sat well with the fresh dark grey walls, and gave the room a far brighter feel underfoot than the dark stained pine they'd lived with for years.

The challenge

The existing floor was original tongue-and-groove pine, badly cup-stained from decades of finishes and previous repairs, sitting on softwood joists with mixed gap sizes. Lifting the boards revealed uneven joist tops, an old gas-pipe run, and zero acoustic separation to the room below. The cast-iron fireplace hearth had to remain in place, which meant the herringbone had to scribe cleanly around an irregular curved profile.

Our approach

• Lift, level and prep — We carefully lifted the original boards and set them aside (the client wanted them re-purposed for shelving), planed two proud joist tops where they sat 4–6 mm above the run, and screwed off any squeaks. An 18 mm structural ply overlay was then fitted to the joists with packers, fully screwed at 200 mm centres, to give a flat, monolithic substrate.
• Acoustic and moisture detail — A 3 mm fibreboard acoustic underlay was loose-laid over the ply to take the edge off footfall transmission to the room below, and a perimeter expansion gap of 12 mm was set out behind the new skirtings.
• Setting out the herringbone — We pulled a setting-out line from the centre of the bay window so the herringbone V points cleanly down the room toward the fireplace. The hearth was templated in card first and the cuts made on the bench, so the field tiles meet the curve without any visible adjustment cuts on the floor.
• Fit and finish — 600 × 120 mm engineered oak herringbone blocks fully bonded to the ply with the manufacturer's specified MS-polymer adhesive, hand-rolled in both directions. The factory matt-lacquered finish was protected during the rest of the trades' work and given a final buff at handover.

The result

A 22 sqm engineered oak herringbone floor that completely changes the character of the room — bright, even and modern against the dark walls, but warm enough to read alongside the original cast-iron fireplace. The acoustic underlay knocked the perceived footfall back noticeably, and the herringbone scribes cleanly around the period hearth as if the two were always meant to sit together.