My OH has been quoted £12000 + VAT to make a level subfloor and then cover with Havwoods Ventureplank 959 engineered oak flooring. For about 80sqm in total. At £150/sqm + VAT that seems rather spendy to me. :-o Although it does include the presumably fiddly work of covering a (bog-standard) staircase, too.

So I went looking for engineered oak flooring costs but I can't seen any typical online prices for Havwoods' stuff. Most of the similar types that I can find seem to be around £50/sqm = £4400 for the total area (inc 10% for wastage).

So perhaps Havwoods is super-high-grade and a lot more than £50/sqm? Or is the fitter making a mint on labour (as well as the usual trade mark-up on materials)?

Any ideas?

Oooooo...My neighbour is Mr Havwoods (that's not his real name but you get the point). He's not in right now but I'll ask him when I see him at some point over the weekend.

Any info from Mr Havwoods would be very useful!

Good question. I forget the details, but it was specced by the fitter and a surveyor (who was there for another reason) concurred with his approach. The main faff-factor is the variety of downstairs surfaces (some old concrete, some new concrete, some existing floor boards, odd thresholds, not very even). Basically imagine a '50s house with conventional plank flooring, but several extensions, and now all being levelled for one continuous run of flooring.

I believe the subfloor involves some thin foam (similar?) going down and then screed, but I wasn't listening to all of the details, I'm afraid.

Find an independant local timber mill, there are loads of varients of oak flooring, the eastern block countries are excellet at this sort of mass production. I had my ensuite to do and picked up some lovely 3/4" thick double interlocked oak with a water protection and satin finish for about £45 persq meter. Its better then the best stuff they do at B&Q and they wanted 130 per sq/m for the inferior product.

Honestly flooring can be bloody expensive and with a little time you can save a lot of money.

Gwiz

I had a floor from BHW in 2007 and it was excellent. Looks as good today as it did the day it went down. Worked out at about £50 a meter as I had it fumed, distressed and prewaxed which was extra. This last time I did price them up but they were at the top end and didn't want to offer any decent discount for 300 sq meters.

In the end I found a local supplier who did me a 33% discount on a 19mm engineered oak floor. I ended up paying an old time joiner £2,700 to (slowly) fit it over 6 weeks, another £300 in edging and £250 in polywax and then I had 300 meters of low tog underlay. All in for 300 meters, £13,500.

Very late follow up to say OH is dischuffed.

The original quote was for European oak with a very high spec (colour, knots, filled defects, etc). It wasn't Havwoods (my bad memory) but Hakwood's Prime oak that was specified:
http://www.hakwood.com/productengineered.php?ID=1&...

And it now turns out the chap has installed Chinese oak with a lesser spec (in particular wider colour variation, larger and more knots, and filled defects). He claims that "prime is prime".

This may get ugly...

I assume he's been paid in full?

How did you come to discover the different material after paying him but not before?

(apologies for making this thread a bit bloggy, but for completeness, here's another update...)

It gets worse... the edges of the flooring boards that are closest to the patio doors have all lifted - by about 30mm!!! It's like a trampoline.

It's as if the lower 15mm of ply has expanded more than the 6mm top surface of oak with the recent sun.