Laminate Skirting Boards, Scotia and Edging Guide

Skirting Boards & Scotia

Adding skirting boards and scotia is the final touch to your beautiful laminate flooring. Are you stuck between choosing a skirting board or scotia for your brand-new laminate flooring? Well, fear not. Here, we discuss the differences, purposes, and benefits of each product.

Laminate Skirting Boards

Skirting boards, also known as decorative timber, are required with every laminate installation to cover the mandatory 10mm expansion gap around the room. Skirting boards have two major purposes. Laminate skirting serves as a form of protection for the wall. For example, protecting the wall from knocks and grazes. The second purpose is quite simply for decorative reasons. It looks good!

Some may choose to remove their current skirting and re-fit it after the floor, but if you need a whole new skirting, we have plenty to choose from!

We have plenty of skirting boards to choose from to match your laminate flooring.

Installing new laminate flooring? See our guide on How to Install Laminate Flooring for everything you need to know.

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Should Skirting Match The Floor?

As a general rule, we say that skirting should match your laminate floor. This add a layer of consistency to your floor and has a natural finish.

Laminate Scotia

Scotia is simply a thin, long piece of wood that runs along the bottom of the wall in between the wall and the laminate flooring. All wood flooring requires a gap, as previously mentioned, along the edges of the floor between the wooden planks and the wall.

If you're keeping your current skirting boards where they are, you'll have to bridge the gap between the floor and the skirting board. This can be done by using a scotia or a 'beading' to seamlessly cover the expansion gap. Like the skirting boards, we supply this either in white or to colour match your laminate.

When choosing the right skirting board and scotia for your home, room suitability is very important to consider. Read our guide on Laminate Flooring Room Suitability.

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Edging Options

When choosing your laminate flooring, one of your decisions is which kind of edging is the right one. We offer a selection of laminate floor edging options, including square edge, bevelled edge, and microbevelled edge. Each has its purpose, and all are attractive in their own way. Here, we discuss each edging option to help you decide which is the perfect fit.

Square Edge Laminate

When a laminate board has a square edge, the ends of all planks meet squarely creating a smooth, uniform surface that blends the wood floor together from plank to plank. The overall look of this floor gives a more contemporary flair and formal feeling to the room.

The main benefits of a square edge laminate:

Easy to maintain and clean
Unlikely to attract dirt or dust
Has a modern finish

If you are installing new laminate flooring, we suggest you read our guide on How to Install Laminate Flooring.

Bevelled Edge Laminate

Bevelled edges on laminates help to accentuate each individual plank, resulting in a more traditional floorboard appearance. Bevelled edge planks have a very distinctive, deep v-groove. They lend themselves more to an informal and country decor. The deep bevelling helps hide tiny gaps which can develop between boards.

The main benefits of a bevelled edge laminate:

Suited to large spaces
Differentiates between each plank, offering a natural finish

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Are you looking for the right laminate skirting and scotia for your home? Read our Skirting Boards & Scotia guide.

Microbevelled Edge Laminate

Some people found that bevelled edges could become dust-traps, so microbevels were introduced. Microbevelled means each plank has a slightly bevelled edge. It's a subtle way to distinguish between each laminate plank, as opposed to the deeper bevelled edge which some find too distinct. Similarly, to a bevelled edge, a microbevelled edge has some key benefits.

The main benefits of microbevelled edge laminate:

Easy to maintain
Differentiates between each plank, offering a natural finish
Easier to install

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Now we have gone through your edging options, it's important to consider room suitability.

Important tip

Important tip: it's standard to add an extra 5% on to your area to allow for the usual wastage that occurs during installation. To calculate this, you'll need to multiply the total area by 1.05. However, parquet and tiled floors where the installation starts in the middle of the room require 7-10% wastage as it's likely you'll have to cut more boards than with a regular, strait-lay design.

Measuring for Carpet

First, you'll need to measure the length & width of your room. You'll also need to allow for extra material for the installer to "cut in". When carpets are fitted, they need to run at least 5cm up each wall so they can be trimmed more accurately to fit against your skirting boards.

The most common widths for carpets are 4 & 5 metres. The width always refers to the width of the carpet, and the length is the other measurement, be it longer or shorter than the width. For example, if your room is 2.7 x 3.9 metres, you would opt for a 4-metre width carpet and purchase 2.75 metres in length, giving you 11m2 in total. If you want the design of your carpet to be in a lengthways direction, you'd need to purchase 4 metres of the 4-metre-wide carpet, giving you 16m2 in total.

Measuring Carpet for Stairs, Hallways & Landings

Draw a detailed plan of all of the flat areas involved, including any rooms that you intend to do in the same quality and colour as your hall, stairs and landing (HSL). Write each measurement against each wall.

Make a note of how many straight stairs you have and measure the width of these stairs. We recommend allowing 50cm extra in length for each straight step.

Make a note of any ½ landings, winders & kites that you may have (kites and winders are triangular-shaped stairs that create a curve in your staircase). Measure the length and width of each of these steps remembering that the length is the measurement that runs over the nose of the step and the width is the measurement running from side to side as you look up the staircase.

You'll need to decide whether to use 4.00 or 5.00-metre width carpet. Make sure you check which widths are available in your chosen carpet before you make this decision as you don't want to work it out in 5.00-metre width to realise your carpet only comes in 4.00-metre width!

Now the fun part! Draw a rectangle on your piece of paper and write the width at the top of the page and then try and fit all of the pieces that you need into that rectangle, ensuring that all of your relevant measurements will work within the space you have allowed. Diagram 1 shows an example of a HSL plan.

Remember, if you are carpeting some rooms in the same carpet that you intend to put on your stairs then you can use waste material from the rooms to use on the stairs, this may mean buying less carpet for your HSL.