If you’re buying solid oak flooring, it is often worth paying a professional to install it for you. Depending on the circumstances and your DIY experience, though, you may well be able to do the job yourself.

Oak floors come in a variety of different forms. Solid oak flooring is slightly harder to install than some of the alternatives, but even this is possible to do with a little patience and expertise – and is well worth it for the overall effect. However, there will be different choices for fitting your floor depending on the surface on which you are installing it. Fixing to screed requires a different approach than to joists.

Before you start Solid hardwood flooring requires a period of time to acclimatise to the conditions in your home before you install it. Like all wood, oak is sensitive to changes in temperature and humidity, and it is important to let it ‘rest’ in the room in which you are fitting it for a couple of weeks to allow it to adjust its shape accordingly. Additionally, you should plan to leaves an expansion gap at the edges of the room – around 1.5mm should be adequate. Allow any new plaster or cement to dry out, too. A day per millimetre of thickness of screed or cement should be enough.

Methods of installation There are two or three ways to install oak flooring, depending on your circumstances: • Mechanical fixings • Adhesives • ‘Floating’ a floor

Mechanical fixings can be screws (with pre-drilled holes), surface nailing or ‘secret’ nailing. These are all simple and reliable ways of installing solid oak floors. It is how floor boards have traditionally been fitted for centuries. If you’ve walked around a stately home and admired the oak floors, you can be reassured that this was how they were installed. Secret nailing is an attractive development because the nails are invisible at the end of the process. Instead of being driven vertically downwards, leaving the head on top, nails are used at the edge of the boards – often at the edge of the tongue, if there is one – at an angle.

Flexible adhesives are used in different circumstances, sometimes as a sole method of fixing oak hardwood flooring – perhaps over screed or concrete, where there is nothing to drive nails into – or as a secondary fixing to give a floor extra stability.

Floating a floor is slightly more complicated and does not involve fixing the floor boards to the surface underneath. Instead they are fixed together. It is important that they are not directly joined – oak hardwood flooring expands and contracts and this can be disastrous if you have a large raft of boards. Instead, the boards can be fitted to an underlay of adhesive foam, which simply rests on the screed base.

Timber joists Oak flooring can be fixed to joists with nails or screws. Particularly if you are working on the ground floor, you will need to fasten a layer of waterproof plastic down first (often known as visqueen); your oak hardwood flooring will

otherwise ‘cup’ and warp if there is any dampness around. You can also use heavy- duty flexible adhesives like ‘liquid batten’ or similar. If you are secret nailing wider boards (180mm and upwards), it can help to use a flexible adhesive on the back to ensure maximum stability.

This article was supplied by solid oak flooring suppliers, Sutton Timber. Click here for more information on solid oak flooring.

Oak flooring is a great choice for your home, and enduringly popular. But before you buy, make sure you take a few steps to make sure it’s as good for the environment.

1. Ask!

Any company that sells oak flooring of any sort is in the business of dealing with wood. That inevitably has an impact on the environment that can either be reduced (even giving net benefit to the ecosystem) or ignored. There’s no excuse for not knowing how their products impact the environment or what they’re doing to address that. If the information isn’t freely available, ideally somewhere obvious on their website, then you can assume they are not doing their bit. Their environmental policies should be a point of pride, not a source of embarrassment. If there’s any uncertainty or woolly thinking around this, avoid them.

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The process of mixing concrete in a cement mixer is quite an easy one to follow. As long as you’ve got the right equipment and ingredients to hand, you can have a decent batch of concrete ready in record time.

Cement mixers are really useful when you are mixing concrete; not only do they help to give your mixture consistency but they can also save you a lot of effort compared to if you decided to mix the concrete manually. At its most basic, concrete is a very simple mixture. All it requires is cement, aggregate and water.

The aggregate is there to give the mixture strength, the cement is used to bind it together, and the water starts a chemical reaction with the cement that encourages the mixture to harden. Let’s take a look at how you can mix your own concrete using a cement mixer.

Step one: the supplies

The first thing you need to do is make sure you’ve got everything you need to make the concrete. This doesn’t just mean the ingredients and the cement mixer but also the tools you’ll need for pouring and levelling the cement. The area where you will be pouring it will also need to be prepared because once you have mixed the concrete, you won’t have long to get it out of the cement mixer and poured out.

This means it’s really important you’re certain you have got enough cement, aggregate and water to complete the job as the entire project area needs to be poured out at once. If you don’t do this, the concrete won’t dry evenly and it is very likely to crack.

Step two: starting the mixer

Now you need to switch on your cement mixer. Since it is likely to be quite dusty from previous use, it can be a good idea to add a bit of water to it to reduce this. If you haven’t already, make sure you’re wearing eye goggles and, if possible, protective gloves.

The next step is to add the aggregate into the mixer, along with a little bit more water so it doesn’t all clump together.

Step three: cement

Make sure you are using Portland cement for this. Using the recommended measurements on the bag of cement you have bought, add the cement to the mixer.

As a sample measurement, if you are using your concrete for a foundation, you might need to use five parts aggregate to one part cement, but look up your preferred concrete usage to find out the exact measurements you will need.

Step four: water

Now you need to add more water to bind the mix together. How much water you need will depend on how strong you want your concrete, but a common ratio is one cup of water for each pound of cement you have added.

You need to make sure the consistency of the concrete is pourable. The more water you add, the weaker the concrete will be, so be careful not to add too much.

Step five: mixing

Before you pour out the concrete, you need to be certain that all of the mixture is wet and thoroughly mixed together. This means that you need to leave the cement mixture for a few minutes so that it will all mix properly. Once you’re certain the concrete is ready, switch of the cement mixer and you can then get on with the job of pouring it out – just make sure to do this quickly, before it hardens too much to work with.

Plastic window shutters are far easier to maintain than traditional functional ones, but every now and then they will need a little attention to keep them looking in their best condition.

Plastic window shutters are an excellent way to give a new look to your house, and the good news is that their maintenance requirements are very limited. Some shutters can simply be installed and more-or-less forgotten about, barring the occasional light clean. Others will need a repaint every few years. Either way, maintenance is easy enough to carry out yourself and takes comparatively little time.

Remove your shutters

Whatever the design and material of your external window shutters, the first step is to remove them from the side of your house. You may be tempted to save time by cleaning them and painting them while they are still fixed to the wall, but this is a false economy. Aside from being needlessly dangerous – especially if you are painting them at the top of a ladder – it is impossible to do a really good job while they are in position.

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You can pay to have your shutters installed, but it is a relatively simple process to do yourself. A drill, a screwdriver and a ladder are all the tools you will need to mount your shutters on your house.

Installing decorative window shutters is a relatively simple process. You can opt to pay for installation with delivery, but if you have a little time and DIY experience, as well as some basic tools, you can easily do the job yourself.

Positioning decorative vs functional shutters

If your shutters are functional – that is, designed to open and close – then you will need to take a little more care with installation since they need to meet precisely in the middle to avoid overlapping or leaving a gap. However, most shutters in the UK are decorative. This is partly because windows in the UK tend to be a different shape, typically long and wide, whereas ones on the continent are narrower and higher, and more deeply recessed. This means that most windows in Britain would look odd with functional shutters on them. Decorative shutters do not need to open and close, and therefore do not have to be the same area and proportion as the window.

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