Laminate flooring, supplied and fitted across Kent

The AC rating on a laminate box, usually AC3 to AC5, comes from a European test that drags an abrasive wheel across the wear layer until the printed pattern starts to show through. It tells you about surface abrasion resistance, meaning how long the floor keeps its printed finish under foot traffic and grit. It tells you nothing about impact resistance, moisture tolerance or joint strength, which is why an AC5 board can still be dented by a dropped pan or swell at a leaking dishwasher joint.

For most Kent homes an AC4 board is the sensible middle ground, giving commercial-grade wear resistance in a domestic pack at a domestic price. AC3 suits bedrooms and low-traffic rooms where the floor sees socks and slippers rather than boots and paws. We would not fit AC3 in a hallway or kitchen regardless of how the room looks on the day, because the rating is the one number on the box that genuinely predicts how the surface will look in five years.

A floating laminate floor needs a continuous expansion gap of around ten to fifteen millimetres around every fixed edge, larger in bigger open-plan rooms and at doorways between rooms so the floor is not locked into one enormous rigid sheet. In rooms wider than about eight to ten metres in any direction we build in an expansion joint or transition strip partway across, because a single unbroken run that size will generate more movement than the perimeter gap alone can absorb.

Perimeter movement is normal and expected. What is not normal is a floor that bows, cups at the edges or develops a visible ridge, which usually means the gap was closed off by skirting fitted too tight, a door threshold packed hard against the boards, or furniture legs pinning the floor to the subfloor. We check every perimeter detail on handover, because a floor that looked perfect on fitting day can telegraph a closed gap weeks later once the seasons turn.

Laminate boards typically run from about seven to twelve millimetres thick, and thickness affects two things a customer actually notices day to day: how forgiving the floor is over a slightly imperfect subfloor, and how the floor sounds underfoot. Thinner boards flex more over minor dips and can develop a faint hollow or clicking sound where the underlay has not filled a low spot completely. Thicker boards, generally ten millimetres and above, feel more substantial and transmit less of that hollow floating-floor sound.

The hollow sound itself is not a fault, it is a characteristic of any floating floor over an air gap created by the underlay, and no laminate will ever sound quite like a floor fixed directly to the subfloor. What we do control is subfloor preparation, because a genuinely flat subfloor within manufacturer tolerance, checked with a straight edge before the underlay goes down, removes most of the drumminess customers associate with a cheap-feeling laminate fit.

Scratching and denting are different failure modes and laminate handles them very differently. The resin overlay resists surface scratching well, which is exactly what the AC rating is testing, so laminate generally shrugs off the fine scuffing that would mark a lacquered wood floor. Grit dragged under shoes or dog claws over years will eventually dull the surface sheen, but a genuinely deep scratch through to the decor paper is uncommon on a correctly rated board.

Denting is the opposite story. The HDF core is dense but not soft or resilient the way solid wood fibre is, so a sharp point load, a stiletto heel, a dropped tin, a dining chair leg without a felt pad, can leave a permanent compression mark that no amount of cleaning removes. Unlike a solid wood floor, a dented laminate board cannot be sanded back, because there is no wear layer depth below the printed pattern. A dented board has to be replaced.

The three failure patterns we get called out to most often are gapping, peaking and swelling from standing water, and each one has a distinct, identifiable cause rather than being random bad luck with the product. Gapping, visible dark lines opening up between boards, is almost always a humidity swing acting on a floor that had too tight an expansion gap to begin with, or a room that runs unusually dry in winter with heating on and no humidity buffer.

Peaking, where a joint lifts into a visible ridge, is the opposite problem, a floor with nowhere to expand into because the perimeter gap was closed by skirting, a threshold bar, or built-in furniture fitted after the floor with no allowance made. Standing water damage looks different again, a localised soft, swollen, darkened patch rather than a ridge running along a joint line, and it does not recover once dry the way gapping and peaking often do when conditions normalise.