What is it?
The floor finish is the final, visible, walked-on surface of a floor (carpet, timber, tile, or a resilient sheet or plank material) laid over the screed (or structural floor deck directly, in some build-ups). It's the last layer in the floor build-up and the only one anyone actually sees or feels underfoot.
- 1Timber Floor Finish
- 2Adhesive
- 3Substrate (timber boards)
What does it do?
Wearing surface and appearance It takes the day-to-day wear of foot traffic and furniture, and sets the look and feel of the room (colour, texture, pattern) more than almost any other single finish.
Underfoot comfort and acoustics A soft finish like carpet gives underfoot warmth and absorbs impact sound; a hard finish like tile or timber is cooler and more reflective, and often needs an acoustic underlay beneath it where sound transmission between floors matters.
Protecting the structure beneath The finish shields the screed or structural deck from wear, moisture and staining, so a well-chosen finish also protects the more expensive, harder-to-replace layers underneath it.
Where is it used?
Every occupied floor in a building, chosen room by room. A kitchen or bathroom typically gets a hard, water-tolerant finish, a bedroom or living room more often carpet or timber, and the choice usually changes at a threshold strip where one finish meets another.
Types
The main families of floor finish, each suited to different rooms and different budgets.
Carpet
Soft, warm underfoot, and the best of the common finishes for impact sound absorption, the usual choice for bedrooms and other quiet rooms. Laid over an underlay, either fitted (stretched and gripped at the edges) or loose-laid.
Timber and engineered wood
Solid or engineered wood boards, or parquet blocks laid in a pattern such as herringbone, bonded or floated over the screed. The screed needs to be properly dry before laying, since residual moisture can cause the timber to cup, gap or lift later, and an expansion gap is left at the perimeter (hidden under skirting) to allow for humidity movement. Not every species and fixing method tolerates underfloor heating equally well, so that needs checking before it's specified.
Tile and stone
Ceramic, porcelain or natural stone, bonded to the screed with tile adhesive. Hard-wearing and water-tolerant, so the standard choice for kitchens, bathrooms and other wet or heavy-traffic areas.
Resilient (LVT, vinyl, laminate)
Luxury vinyl tile (LVT), sheet vinyl, and laminate are all a manufactured wear layer over a core board or sheet, usually floating or loose-laid rather than bonded down. A cost-effective, water-tolerant alternative to real timber or stone.
How to specify
The finish is chosen per room against how it'll actually be used (wet or dry, quiet or heavy-traffic, underfoot comfort wanted or not) and coordinated with the screed's moisture content (a bonded finish laid too early over a damp screed can fail), with underfloor heating if there is any (not every finish and fixing method tolerates it well), and with the finished floor level, since the finish's own thickness plus its fixing method both add to the build-up height.
Other considerations
Different rooms often end up with different finishes at different thicknesses, so the floor build-up beneath each one (screed depth, insulation) sometimes has to be adjusted room by room to keep the finished floor level consistent across the whole storey. Where two finishes meet, a threshold strip covers and protects the joint.
Interacting elements
- Screed: the layer most floor finishes are laid on or bonded to
- Threshold strip: covers and protects the joint where one floor finish meets another
- Skirting and coving: finishes the joint between the floor and the wall