Herringbone Flooring Buyers Guide

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Synonymous with luxury and combining beauty with practicality, herringbone wood flooring is a popular choice in modern homes as well as older buildings.

A type of parquet, the name herringbone comes from the appearance and its similarity to the skeleton of the herring fish. Other types of parquet flooring patterns include chevron, Versailles style, and basket style.

What Is Herringbone Wood Flooring?

Herringbone wooden flooring is a particular pattern of parquet flooring. Traditionally parquet flooring was solid wood, which despite being a hardwearing and beautiful material is not always affordable for everyone. However, with the availability of engineered wooden flooring parquet floors, including herringbone wood flooring is now a more affordable option whatever your budget.

The herringbone pattern is formed by laying rectangular floor boards at 90degree angles. This creates a slight overlap at each end meaning that a zigzag is repeated both horizontally and vertically.

Benefits Of Herringbone Wood Flooring

• Parquet flooring in general is robust and long lasting.
• Herringbone pattern in particular is renowned for strength and durability.
• Any style of home and decor suits herringbone wood flooring, from traditional to contemporary.
• Herringbone wood flooring is versatile, different sizes, colours, and pricing options are available.
• The zigzag pattern of herringbone style flooring creates an illusion of space.
• Herringbone parquet floors are timeless - they&#;ve been used for over 400 years!
• With proper finishing and care they will last for generations.
• Herringbone wooden flooring is easy to clean.

Different Types of Herringbone Wood Flooring

Solid Wood or Engineered Wood?

Herringbone wood flooring is traditionally a solid wood floor. However, modern advances in engineered wooden floors mean that it is now possible to have all the elegance, warmth, and luxury of a solid wood herringbone parquet floor with the added benefits of engineered wood. This includes an increased ability to withstand changes in temperature.

Engineered wood is also usually cheaper, meaning you can have herringbone flooring even on a budget.

Difference Between Herringbone and Chevron Flooring

Herringbone and chevron flooring are both a type of parquet. They are also both zigzag patterned flooring.

The difference between these patterns is that with chevron flooring the ends of the planks are cut at an angle. This means that the zigzag pattern is split with clean straight lines like V&#;s.

With a herringbone pattern, the planks are square-edged rectangles.

How to Select the Best Herringbone Wooden Floor for your Project?

Selecting the best herringbone flooring for your project means thinking about a variety of different things from the practical to the aesthetic.

Practical Considerations When Choosing Herringbone Flooring

• Moisture and humidity levels will affect whether you should choose engineered or solid wood.
• Size of space, this will have the biggest impact on your budget, in a smaller space it might be worth pushing to the very limits of your budget for a higher quality.
• Floating or fixed floor, this will affect the type of herringbone recommended and is dependent on the subfloor layer. Floating floors can make a big difference to noise levels if this is an important consideration for you.

Aesthetic Considerations When Choosing Herringbone Flooring

• Colour.
• Species.
• Design, herringbone flooring has the same basic design but you can choose single, double, or triple layered herringbone patterns.
• Size of planking.

How Much Does Herringbone Wood Flooring Cost?

This depends on your budget and your requirements.

You can get Herringbone wood flooring for under £40 per square metre or over £80 per square metre.

The differences in cost will come down to wood species, thickness, and finish as well as the size of the planks and the area being covered.

Installation costs will vary as well, depending on the method, size of planks and the size of the space or whether you are laying the herringbone flooring yourself.

How to Install Herringbone Wood Flooring

• Check the suitability of the subfloor and do preparatory work, if required, to ensure the moisture level is not too high and that the subfloor is level.
• Measure the space.
• Choose and purchase the type of herringbone wood flooring, whether solid wood or engineered wood, colour, width, species, grade, choose a floating or fully bonded adhesion method, finish and whether you will install the flooring yourself or hire a contractor.
• Acclimatise the flooring for around 3 days in the room where it will be laid allowing as much air to get to each piece as possible.
• During these 3 days read and reread the installation guide that comes with your flooring. Don&#;t skip this step!
• Open and mix up the packs of flooring to ensure any natural variations are spread throughout the flooring. Alternatively, if you are using deliberately varied colours then mix as per your design.
• Sort the planks into two piles, left side and right side.
• Gather your tools, we would recommend ensuring you know how to use them all safely beforehand and having the correct PPE as well. Tools you might need include: chalk,  hammer, cordless screwdriver, square, tape measure, handsaw, and perhaps a jigsaw.
• Check any doors will fit over the flooring and temporarily remove doors if required/possible.
• Set out the flooring to avoid any mistakes and ensure you allow around 10-12mm around the edges as an expansion gap.
• Make a starter board (people usually use plywood for this) this needs to be the same length as your planks but square.
• For the herringbone design use chalk to mark a central axis; this is your X lines.
• Intersect the X line with your Y line at a 90degree angle. Double Check all angles and measurements before continuing.
• From the Y line measure 27mm on each side and mark these two lines A and B with chalk these are your guide lines. The Y line is in the middle between your A planks and B planks.
• Line up the starter board with the top corner on your B line.
• Lay out three rows, to enable you to mark out the next set of guide lines (C and D lines) and so on until you have guide lines over the whole area to be laid.
• If you are using adhesive ensure you only spread an area that you can comfortably fit in 20 minutes so that it does not dry out.

If you have questions on anything you&#;ve read in this article or want to talk to our wooden flooring experts for advice then please get in touch with us at Wooden Floors UK.

Just because something is trending, doesn&#;t also mean that it can&#;t be timeless as well. But how do you know? 

After our herringbone wood floor was installed in our entry, I got to thinking that a really good test of whether you&#;re installing something timeless is to ask this question:

Would anyone walk into my house and immediately think, &#;Wow, these floors are so dated they need to come out immediately!!&#;

No, they wouldn&#;t.

But we would certainly say that about the basic taupe tile that everyone installed inside the grey trend &#; because it screams, &#;I was installed in the grey trend.&#; 

Yes, there are many ways to describe timeless, but I liked this one I found in the Collins Dictionary:

If you describe something as timeless, you mean that it is so good or beautiful that it cannot be affected by changes in society or fashion. 

Timeless really is about standing the test of time. Here&#;s another post where I defined it further. 

Herringbone Floors: Timeless or Trendy?

Herringbone floors fill the homes, hallways and streets of Europe and have for centuries. Is Herringbone trending right now? It definitely is. But it&#;s also a timeless pattern. It&#;s important to remember, just because something is trending, doesn&#;t mean it can&#;t be timeless. Timeless finishes have their moment too.

Taupe was THE MOST popular &#;grey&#; of this era because it&#;s basically a combination of grey and beige. This makes it look cooler than all the beiges. And while everyone wanted grey they often preferred the warmer side of the greys.

Get my newly designed (real paint) Understanding Undertones® Colour wheel here

Therefore, since my house was a custom build 12 years go, which would have been right in the middle of the grey trend, it&#;s no wonder I inherited a house that was filled with taupe from top to bottom.

This was the taupe 12&#; x 24&#; tile that was in the entry when we purchased the home. We interviewed a few hardwood flooring experts and found a company who located the existing engineered white oak flooring that we already had (and refinished it). It was ordered way back in November and just installed two weeks ago.

This was my inspiration photo:

In order to choose the pattern, we needed to decide which wall we would look at most &#; in other words, which area would be the focal point. This determines which direction the centre point would go:

We went with option 2 because when you walk into the entry you immediately see the staircase and the wall at the end of the hallway.

The other interesting tip is that the border going all the way around was ordered slightly wider than the existing wood floor boards I had (see the stained wood on the left in the photo below). The reason is that when the herringbone was installed this border board could be cut to size.

This eliminates small cuts when adding the herringbone boards &#; to accomodate for the full pattern. . . okay I&#;m not the expert and I&#;m likely describing this wrong. If you know, you know.

Here it is installed before it was stained to match the rest of my medium brown floors:

And here&#;s the after, so gorgeous!

Let&#;s see the before again, shall we:

Are you interested in learning more about EIR SPC Flooring? Contact us today to secure an expert consultation!

And here&#;s the after:

You can watch the transformation here too:

 

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Maria Killam (@mariakillam)

Tired of hearing about grey wood floors?

Speaking of instagram, when I reposted my &#;Grey floors should never have been invented&#; reel on Instagram a couple weeks ago and it quickly amassed over a million views again. &#;

I wish I could turn this into a formula to use over and over again. I&#;ve talked about grey floors numerous times. What&#;s the magic with this video?

Unfortunately, it&#;s before I stopped putting black eyeliner under my eyes. After so many millennials were quick to inform me how bad it was, I changed my ways! They didn&#;t care for my red and yellow outfit as well, haha. 

In all seriousness, I stop reading the comments when a video goes viral because people are naturally upset that they realize they didn&#;t make the best decision. Sometimes you simply can&#;t &#;unsee&#; what I&#;ve pointed out. But if you are someone who found me from these videos, please know that it&#;s OK!

We ALL make mistakes in our decorating until we learn. And once we learn, we can do better next time.

That&#;s why I share some of my early design mistakes in my True Colour Expert Training. Every master was once a disaster, right?!

And, if you have grey floors, here&#;s how you can warm them up. Stick around, because my advice circles back to help you decorate around the things you cannot change too. Because I want you to love your home no matter what!

Since those videos on Instagram, I receive a lot of messages from followers asking me questions like, &#;Hey I&#;m considering ___________, is it trendy or timeless?&#;

There were also a lot of people who didn&#;t like my leopard runner (and that&#;s fine, I know it&#;s not for everyone) and declared it trendy. And, they&#;re not exactly wrong.

So here&#;s the thing, in my mind, carpet should NOT have an endless shelf life (ewwwww). Most people (if they can) are quick to replace inherited carpeting. It&#;s different than inherited stone floors or tile. 

Remember, timeless means that it&#;s so good or beautiful that it cannot be affected by changes in society or fashion &#; meaning you cannot immediately identify the trend cycle or era it was installed in.

Here&#;s my design philosophy. Install timeless finishes so that you can be trendy in your decorating. For example, it&#;s a lot easier and less expensive to replace your sofa or wallpaper, than replacing tile floors in your entry, sunroom or bathroom like I had to replace in this home. Not to mention disruptive and messy. 

The pushback that I get all the time are comments that sound like this:

&#;Install what you like. It&#;s YOUR house. YOU have to love it.&#;

This makes good copy in an article and it makes it easy for a salesperson to sell trendy finishes. But truly, we have all bought trendy items that quickly lost their charm as we watched them eventually or immediately look DATED.

That&#;s when we have &#;renovation regret&#; and wish we would have done something different. I bet each and every one of us has made this mistake before.

But that&#;s why boring now equals timeless later. When you install boring subway tile (for example) you can watch the trends come and go without getting upset that your renovation hadn&#;t started a little later because you&#;re already out of love with the trendy backsplash you installed.

If you&#;d like to learn how to decorate in a timeless way, become a True Colour Expert this Spring here.

Are you working on a renovation or new build this year? Work with me via eDesign here.

Related posts:

My New Leopard Print Runner

My New Living Room (Center Fireplace) Furniture Layout

What our New House Really Looks Like