Laminate flooring in a hallway: which way to lay it and how to make it last

Run the boards along the hall, towards the front door, buy a board rated for heavy traffic, and break the floor at the doorways. Those three decisions are most of the job. Direction matters more in a hallway than anywhere else in the house: a hall around 1 m wide is narrower than most boards are long, so boards laid across it need a cut at every row and read as stripes, while boards laid along it run in whole lengths and pull the eye down the space. Hallways also take the hardest wear in the house, every room's traffic passes through, so this is the one floor where paying for an AC4 rated board is easy to justify.

Which direction should laminate run in a hallway?

Along its length, and this is the strongest direction call in the whole house. The general rules for which way to lay flooring weigh light against room shape, but in a hallway the shape argument wins outright:

The cost of getting this wrong is real, not just visual. In a 1 m wide hall a 1.2 m board laid across the space touches both walls, so nearly every board carries a cut and the offcuts are too short to reuse. Along the hall, most boards go down whole and the only cuts are the row ends.

Should the laminate run through the doorways?

Usually it should stop at them. Laminate floats, and a floating floor moves with the seasons, so most manufacturers ask for an expansion break where the hall meets each room, covered with a threshold bar. Each floor then moves on its own, and a bar at the door line sits where the eye expects a change anyway.

Running the floor continuously through the doorways is possible and looks smart, but it commits you to three things at once:

• One direction everywhere. The hall and every connected room share the same board direction, whether it suits those rooms or not.
• A total run inside the limit. Most brands cap an unbroken floor at around 10 m in either direction. A hall plus two rooms can pass that quickly, and past the limit the floor needs an expansion profile anyway.
• One floor, one fate. A flood in the kitchen or a repair in one room now involves the hallway floor too.

The full trade-off, including what to do when two different floors meet at a door, is covered in the guide to transitions between rooms.

Where do you start laying in a hallway?

Against the longest straight wall, the same logic as starting any room, but three hallway problems deserve a check before the first board clicks together:

1. Taper. Old halls are rarely parallel. Measure the width at both ends, and if it differs by more than a few millimetres, rip the first row at a slight angle so the taper is shared between both walls instead of appearing as one obviously wedge-shaped final row.
2. The last row's width. A hall around 1 m wide fits only 4 or 5 board widths, so a bad starting width quickly leaves a final strip of 20 or 30 mm. Divide the hall width by the board width before you start, and if the remainder is under about 50 mm, rip the first row down to balance it.
3. Doorways and frames. A hallway has more architraves per square metre than any room. Undercut every frame with a saw laid flat on an offcut so the boards slide underneath, and see the guide to doorways and pipes for the awkward cuts around them.

Keep the 8 to 12 mm expansion gap on every side, including at each doorway threshold. The skirting question, whether boards go in before or after the skirting, is the same as in any room: skirting first or flooring first.

Is laminate hard-wearing enough for a hallway?

Yes, if the rating matches the traffic. A hallway concentrates the whole house's footfall into a few square metres, and adds grit and rainwater from outside, so buy on the AC rating rather than the photo on the box:

Two cheap additions protect whichever board you buy. A doormat or recessed mat well at the front door catches the grit that would otherwise act like sandpaper underfoot, and felt pads under the console table stop the one piece of furniture every hallway has from scratching the boards each time the door knocks it. Water-resistant boards, the kind sold for kitchens, are worth considering when the front door opens straight onto the laminate with no porch.

How much laminate does a hallway need?

Less than almost any room in area, and more than almost any room in waste percentage. Narrow spaces waste proportionally more because offcuts from a 1 m wide run are often too short to restart the next row, and every doorway and radiator pipe adds a cut. Allow 10 percent rather than the 5 to 8 that suits a plain rectangular room.

The sums for a typical hall: 4 m long by 1.1 m wide is 4.4 m². Add 10 percent and you are buying for 4.84 m², which at a common pack size of 2.2 m² means 3 packs, with most of the third pack spare for future repairs. The laminate calculator does this for your own measurements and pack size, and turns the answer into whole packs.