Can you put laminate flooring in a garage?

You can hardly dispute laminate flooring as the top-selling flooring type among the garage and homeowners today. Laminate flooring has surpassed some of the fancied flooring types, such as concrete slabs, due to its ease of installation and aesthetic flair. Even though the concrete slabs offer the strength required for the heavy machinery in the garage and vehicle parking, you will love the artistic value that laminate flooring will give to your garage floors. It is even more alluring if your garage becomes an extension of your home or living space. This is one aspect that most garage owners have missed, and they are always disturbed seeking the answers to the question, “Can you put laminate flooring in a garage?”

Laminate flooring is perfect for garages. It provides comfort to the garage users when handling regular garage activities. Also, with laminate flooring, you get resilient, hard, and durable floors that can withstand any weather and are stain-resistant. The flooring type is easy to install and provides an aesthetic value to the floor coupled with low maintenance to keep the surface in good condition.

Installation Process of Laminate Flooring

Laminate flooring being effective in your garage solely depend on how best you install it. Laminate is much easier to install compared to other floor types. It doesn’t require much effort since the boards are designed to allow interlocking, making them easy to work with. However, this might not be easy for everyone. I have delved into the most crucial step-by-step installation process to help you figure out how best you can do it without strain and unnecessary frustrations.

Read on!

Prepare the Garage

The first step to the installation of the laminate floors is to tidy up the garage floor. The floor should also be free of any liquid components, ensuring it is clean and dry as the water particles can soak the surface over time.

Moreover, since you are dealing with the garage floors, it may have contained certain oil spills or grease commonly used by the mechanics. Such surfaces stained by oil and grease should also be cleaned by using an appropriate detergent.

Level the Floor

Once you’ve made sure that your garage floor is spotlessly clean, you should ensure it’s leveled. Often, the perfect tool for use is a leveling kit or bar. The device provides that the floor surface is flattened. You fill in the low spots with a self-elevating compound and then grind down high spots with a concrete grinder.
Finally, the floor shouldn’t have a more significant difference between two particular points. For instance, when it comes to height, the difference shouldn’t be more than 3.2 inches.

Cover the floor with Polythene Sheet

This step is quite common with most garage flooring types. If you are a contractor, you must have come across this step on several occasions, and you will appreciate the role played by this step. For the laminate floors, you will need a 6mm polythene sheet put on the floor. The polythene sheet helps create a moisture barrier. Nevertheless, for the areas where the sheets are joining, ensure to use an 8-inch overlap.

Place a layer of foam on the floor

The foam layer is crucial in installing the laminate floor because it helps reduce the unnecessary noise that can be produced when stepping on the floors. You must ensure that it has to laps up the baseboard to 2 inches at minimum when placing the foam and use masking tape to secure it to the wall.

Install the Laminate

The step involves laying the laminate on the floor, beginning from the corner of the room towards the center of the room. However, when starting from the center, you should ensure that 0.25 space is created between the laminate floor and the corner wall. You will first put the two rows of the flooring onto the floor. The two rows should be placed unglued to determine the best placement for the laminate.

Glue the Laminate

Gluing the laminate is the last step in the installation of the laminate flooring. For instance,the first two rows of the laminate are glued with adhesive glue making sure it’s spread directly to the rear of the flooring.However, the market places are now dominated by laminate floors that no longer require adhesives as the easier click lock systems characterize them. If you happen not to find one with the click lock systems, you will need glue and use the adhesives as advised by the manufacturers.

This is followed by the subsequent gluing of the other tiles in place. After the laminate has been appropriately glued and placed into respective positions, tap each tile gently with the tapping block and a rubber mallet to ensure they are properly placed against one another.

The final phase of this step is to install the baseboard and then trim it. You will then remove the tape to complete the floor installation.

The video below shows a step-by-step installation process of laminating flooring, particularly for the beginners

Factors to consider when purchasing laminate flooring

Purchasing laminate flooring requires special considerations to ensure that you are getting suitable flooring options that will be long lasting and serves your purpose. Below is a list of factors that will help you make the correct purchasing decision.

Quality

Knowing the best flooring material might be a difficult task to so many people. We all want to buy something that will serve us for a longer period. Therefore, when choosing the quality of flooring for your home, you should consider looking at the laminate thickness since this is the determinant of a good quality flooring laminate. The thicker the laminate, the longer it will stay beautiful and realistic.

Warranty

When you buy an item, you expect that it will endure the various conditions based on your purpose. However, this is not always the case with most of the products we buy. Some of the products are characterized by the manufacturer’s defects that we may not identify at the time of purchase. This where a warranty comes in, as most organizations may have you shoulder the expenses of their failures. Ensure that when buying the laminate flooring products, the units you purchase have a warranty.

Most of the best laminate flooring products, especially those from reputable organizations, have a 30-year warranty. The warranty covers staining, fading, covers peeling and other defects that may result from manufacturers’ defaults. If you have a product that does not have such a warranty, you must be concerned with its longevity. An organization that provides you with such a warranty also enhances the trust of the customers in the product

Traffic

The traffic that your floor will endure is another significant element of consideration. To make maintenance more easier, our choices should be in favor of the kind of items that will be in that area. For instance, when you are to install a laminate in an area that is likely to hold dirt, you should resort to those laminates that are dull in nature. In case one decides to go for lighter colors without considering the type of traffic, then floors might end up getting damaged within a short period.

You also need to consider the foot traffic when installing the laminate floors. Are you installing the laminate floors in a place with high foot traffic? Does dirt characterize the place due to pets and children frequenting the area? These are questions that you need to answer when installing the laminate floors due to the aesthetics they provide. Moreover, you need to consider the footwear of the individuals moving in your garage and your home.

You must also realize that the dark-coloured laminates show less dirt and that the pet hairs stand out against the dark floors. In such a case, especially when you want the laminate floors for homes, I recommend a wood laminate to balance all the concerns with foot traffic. Also, you may go for the textured-stone laminate to add the aesthetics that you require in your garage and home extension

Purpose

We do have different expectations with our flooring areas. One person might want to make a smaller room look bigger and more spacious, and another might want to shrink up a large space. Since we all have different goals, the kind of flooring laminate you decide on choosing should align with it.

Attached Rooms

Most people ignore this factor when installing laminate flooring, yet it is a crucial element of consideration. When you are replacing the flooring in one or two rooms or a garage adjacent to your living space, you must also consider the surrounding flooring. You should ensure that the laminate you choose does not clash against your existing floors.

In that case, you will settle for a laminate color that matches or compliment that of the attached rooms. Since this flooring type does not only provide the resilience needed for the heavyweight in the garage, choosing a type that does not match your flooring color will not provide you with the artistic value offered by the laminate floors due to color clash

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best flooring for a garage?

The best flooring recommended for garages is polished concrete flooring. It’s always preferred as the best option because of its general nature of resilience. It’s ability to operate under high pressure without any wear or tear sums it up all. Also, they are stain-resistant. A factor that makes it a perfect choice for the garage since floors usually gets stained quickly, making them unattractive. Its durability, resilience, and stain resistance stand out among other floorings such as rubber tile flooring, vinyl flooring, and epoxy flooring.

Does temperature affect laminate flooring?

Yes, temperature is a great disaster to every flooring. When temperatures change from hot to cold and back again, it makes the laminate flooring expand and contract, leading to curling and peeling. Winter is always bound to happen, and therefore one should always prepare their flooring for the cold time to cut on the expensive cost of repair. The tips that will help you prevent such damages include the following;

Preventing moisture from building up

Winter causes damage to almost all flooring, inclusive of the strongest and the most resistant ones. Therefore laminate is never an exception despite its moisture-resistant nature. They also suffer water damage if they are continually exposed. The first thing you need to do during the winter season is to ensure that places that are considered susceptible to damage are covered with rugs. Secondly, it’s discovered that getting into your home with shoes is also a risk, and you should consider removing them. Finally, you should make it a routine to clean moisture on the floor as soon as possible to avoid further damages.

Another way of eliminating moisture from accumulating on your floor is by consistently cleaning up your floors. This will help prevent the buildup of harmful winter debris.

Do you need underlay for laminate flooring on concrete?

Yes, a rubber or foam underlayment is a recommendation for laminate flooring during installation. In cases of imperfection in concretes, they should be leveled out before you install underlayment. It’s also important to install a vapor barrier between the concrete and foam underlayment since it keeps cold air from concrete being that it’s a temperature barrier. Generally, concretes are very cold materials. That is why it’s necessary to install better, thicker barriers between concrete and laminate.

Final thoughts

Not every material is considered worthwhile in a garage since it has its own specific needs that have to be met. Therefore, when choosing a material for a garage, laminate flooring is considered the best due to the numerous advantages that are tied to it. Its ability to resist stain makes it the best for garages. However, laminate flooring is also prone to damage despite its toughness and moisture-resistant nature. Therefore if you want your laminate to serve you a longer period, you should make its maintenance a priority as this will help you cut costs on maintenance bills that a time might be higher than the initial price of purchase.