Rooms rebuilt from the floor up.

How to judge a flooring installation from a photograph

Every flooring company on the internet has a gallery, and almost all of them look good, because a wide-angle lens pointed at a tidy room flatters any floor. The material is the easy part to see and the least useful thing to look at. What separates a well-installed floor from an average one is joinery: how the boards are set out, how the edges are dealt with, and what happens where the floor meets something else. Those details are visible in photographs if you know where to look, and this is how you look.

Seam placement and end joint stagger

Plank floors are made of short pieces pretending to be a continuous surface, and the illusion holds or fails on where the end joints land. In a good installation the joints scatter: no two adjacent rows have their ends close together, and there is no repeating diagonal marching across the room. In a poor one you see a stairstep, an obvious pattern of end joints stepping over by the same distance row after row, or a cluster of joints all landing within a few inches of each other.

Most manufacturers specify a minimum offset between end joints in neighbouring rows, commonly six inches or more depending on board length. That is the floor of what is acceptable, not the target. Getting a genuinely random-looking layout takes racking the boards out dry before anything is fastened and pulling from several cartons at once so colour and length mix. Look at the middle of the room in a photograph, not the edges. That is where a rushed layout shows.

Cuts around jambs, registers and pipes

The single fastest way to grade an installer is to look at what happens where the floor meets something that is not a straight wall. Door casings should be undercut so the flooring slides underneath them and the cut edge disappears. If instead you see the flooring cut around the outside of the casing, following its profile with a visible gap filled by caulk, that is a shortcut and it will look worse every year as the caulk shrinks and discolours.

Floor registers are the same test in miniature. The flooring should be cut to the register opening cleanly so the vent sits into a square hole with a tight margin, not screwed down over a ragged edge. Radiator pipes and toilet flanges want a proper scribe: a drilled hole and a slot cut from behind, with the offcut glued back so the join is nearly invisible. Where you see an oversized hole and a plastic cover plate, you are looking at a cover-up.

Stairs are the hardest test of all, because every tread is a separate scribe against two skirtings and the nosing has to be consistent tread after tread. If a gallery includes stairs shot up close, the installer is confident. If every stair photo is taken from the bottom looking up, from twenty feet away, ask why.

Expansion gaps, and why you should not be able to see them

Every hard floor needs a gap at its perimeter to move into. Done right, you never see it: the base or the shoe moulding covers it completely, and the trim sits on the floor without being pinned to it. Done badly, you get one of two failures visible in photographs. Either the gap is too big and the trim does not cover it, leaving a shadow line along the wall, or the gap was left out and the trim is caulked hard down to the boards, which is what causes a floating floor to peak in the middle of a long run months later.

Look along the wall line in a photograph, particularly at doorways and in long corridors. A consistent, invisible perimeter is a sign that somebody measured. Read more about why that gap matters on our laminate page, where floating floor movement is covered in detail.

Transitions between materials and between rooms

A doorway where wood meets tile is a design decision, and there is a right profile for each situation. A T-moulding joins two surfaces at the same height. A reducer steps down from a thicker floor to a thinner one. A threshold or end cap finishes a floor against a fixed edge such as a sliding door track or a hearth. Using the wrong one, or using a tall aluminium strip to bridge a badly cut gap, is immediately obvious and it is the detail people trip over for the next decade.

Two things to check in a photograph. First, does the transition sit low and flat, or does it stand proud enough to catch a shoe. Second, is it centred under the closed door, which is where it should be so that neither room sees the other room's floor from the doorway. Where a project changes material between a kitchen and a hall, the quality of that one strip tells you more than the rest of the room.

Lippage, flatness and raking light

Lippage is a height difference between the edges of two neighbouring planks or tiles. It catches light, catches bare feet, and in tile it loads the grout line until it cracks. It is nearly always a subfloor problem rather than a material problem, which is why our subfloor preparation work exists at all.

Photographs either reveal lippage or hide it, and which one depends entirely on lighting. Flat, even light from head height hides everything. Low, raking light across the surface, the kind you get from a window early or late in the day, throws a shadow off every raised edge. If a contractor's gallery is shot low with side light and the floor still reads dead flat, that is a real signal. If every photograph is taken from standing height in the middle of the day, you are seeing the room, not the floor.

Grout line consistency in tile

Tile has its own set of tells. Grout joints should be the same width along their entire length, and they should line up across the room without wandering. Look at where the grid meets a wall: the cut tiles along that edge should be a sensible width and, ideally, the same width on opposite sides of the room, which only happens if the layout was set out from the centre rather than started from one corner.

Check the colour of the grout in the corners and along the edges too. Grout that is noticeably darker or lighter in patches usually means it was mixed in separate batches with different amounts of water, and it does not even out with time. Finally, look for a soft joint, a line of flexible sealant rather than grout, where the tile meets a wall, a tub or a cabinet run. Rigid grout in those positions cracks, and a photograph taken a year after installation will show exactly where.

Questions about project work