Flooring around doorways, radiator pipes and awkward corners

Doorways, pipes and corners are where a floor's cut list stops being "one cut per row", and where the finished job is actually judged, because that's where people look down. The techniques are simple; what matters is knowing which one applies where, and having each awkward cut planned rather than improvised with the saw running.

Door frames: undercut, don't scribe

The trade method: lay a flooring offcut (plus underlay) flat against the architrave, rest a handsaw on it, and cut the frame bottom off. The offcut sets the exact height. Then the board slides underneath the frame. The messy scribed cut disappears, and the expansion gap hides behind the frame where it can't be seen.

Scribing the board around the architrave's profile is the alternative everyone regrets: five curved cuts per side, and any error is at eye level on the floor you walk through daily.

Under the door itself, plan which board the door line lands on. The board spanning a doorway should be a full-width board, not a sliver, because doorways take the most traffic in the house.

Radiator pipes: the 45° trick

1. Position the board against the pipe, mark the pipe's centre on it.
2. Drill a hole pipe diameter + 20 mm at the mark (the oversize is the expansion gap; a snug hole pins the floor).
3. Saw through the board at 45° angles from the edge to the hole.
4. Fit the main board, glue the cut wedge back in behind the pipe.
5. Cover with a two-part pipe rosette.

Two pipes in one board: same method, both holes first, one connecting cut. The 45° angle matters, because a straight cut across leaves the glued wedge held by nothing.

Doorways between rooms: continue or break

Continuing through looks best but makes the two rooms one expansion raft, and the run-length limits in the expansion gap guide decide whether you're allowed. When boards continue through a doorway, the row grid of one room dictates the other's, the same coupled-arithmetic problem as an L-shaped room, and worth planning the same way.

Awkward corners, columns and hearths

• External corners (chimney breasts, boxed pipes): two boards meet with an L-cut each; keep the gap on both faces.
• Columns: like a pipe hole scaled up. Cut the board in two through the column's centreline, notch each half, and rejoin behind.
• Hearths and islands: fixed objects. The floor is cut around them with a gap, never under them. A fitted kitchen's plinth line, not the wall behind it, is your room edge; the measuring guide covers this.

Plan the awkward cuts before the saw

Every technique above consumes boards (the doorway board, the pipe board and its wedge, the notched pair at a corner), and none of them appear in a naive area calculation. Rooms with several doorways and radiators are a real part of why complicated rooms need the 8% to 12% waste band rather than 5%.

The designer treats doorways, pipes and fixed objects as part of the layout: draw them in, and the boards that meet them arrive on the cut list as specific cuts on specific boards instead of surprises. That's the difference between "around 10% extra" and knowing which board number the doorway lands on.