Engineered Oak Flooring for Older Balwyn Homes

Engineered oak is a good fit for most older Balwyn houses, because the same board can be fixed over the suspended timber floor in the original rooms and glued to the slab under the back extension. In a post-war brick veneer or a 1960s family home, the standard 1900 × 190 mm plank usually suits the room sizes better than a wide board. The work that decides how the floor turns out happens underneath: flatness, bounce, moisture and where the two halves of the house meet.

The Balwyn houses this guide is about

Our Balwyn suburb page covers new builds and knock-down rebuilds. This guide covers the suburb’s older houses: post-war brick veneer homes, cream and red brick family houses from the 1960s and 70s, and many homes that have been added to once or twice since.

They tend to share a few features. The original part of the house sits on stumps with a timber floor on joists, often with the original boards still there under the carpet. The kitchen has usually been redone at least once. There is also often a family room or living area added at the back, built on a concrete slab, sometimes decades after the rest of the house.

That mix of old timber floor and newer slab is the main thing to plan around.

What you get with our engineered oak

Our engineered oak boards are 15 mm thick, with a 4 mm European oak wear layer on a layered core. They have a micro bevel on the edges, join with tongue and groove, and have a matte brushed surface. The brushed texture means fine scratches blend into the grain rather than sitting on top of a shiny coat.

The layered core is the reason engineered boards cope with both halves of an older house. It is more stable than a single piece of timber the same size, so it can be glued to a slab or fixed over a timber subfloor. The 4 mm oak on top is thick enough to be sanded and recoated when the floor looks tired, which matters if you plan to stay in the house a long time.

Laying over the original timber floor

Where the old boards are sound, the new floor can often go straight over them. That avoids pulling up a floor that is doing its job, and it is quicker and less dusty than removal. Before that happens, the installer is looking for a few things.

Bounce and squeaks

If you walk across the old floor in socks, you can usually feel how much it moves. A slight give near the middle of a room is normal. A floor that feels springy, or a board that clicks every time you step on it, usually means loose boards, a joist that has dropped or a stump that has settled. Loose boards get screwed down. Stump and joist problems are fixed before the new floor goes on, because the new boards will follow whatever is underneath.

Cupped boards

Boards with raised edges are usually a sign of moisture from below. If the cupping is mild and the cause is gone, the high spots can be planed or sanded flat. If the subfloor is still damp, that needs to be addressed first. It is also worth checking that the vents in the brickwork near ground level aren’t blocked by garden beds or paving.

Direction

When new boards go over old ones, installers generally run them across the old boards rather than along them, so the new joints don’t sit over the old ones. That can limit which way the floor runs in each room. We recommend settling this at the measure, before you decide on a layout.

If the old floor is in poor condition, it will need to come up. Our floor removal and subfloor page covers what that involves.

The back extension on a slab

A slab behind a timber-floored house brings two separate questions.

The first is moisture. Concrete holds water, and a ground-floor slab can draw moisture up from below. We test before gluing anything down, and a moisture barrier may be needed. An older extension slab is usually dry, but a leak or a garden bed built up against the outside wall can change that in one corner.

The second is height. The timber floor at the front and the slab at the back rarely finish at the same level. Sometimes the difference is small enough to ramp out with levelling compound. Sometimes a step or a trim at the doorway is the better solution. We measure the difference at the join before quoting, so you know which one you are getting.

If you are still deciding whether to match the old floor in the extension or run one new floor through the lot, our guide to matching a timber floor in an extension goes through both approaches.

Plank or wide board in a post-war house

Most Balwyn homes from this era have separate rooms of a modest size: a lounge, a dining room, three or four bedrooms off a hall. The extension at the back is often the only big space. That usually points to the standard plank for most of the house.

	Standard plank	Wide board
Board size	1900 × 190 × 15 mm	2200 × 220 × 15 mm
Per pack	6 boards, 2.166 m²	6 boards, 2.904 m²
Colours in our range	11, plus the four reactive-finish boards	7
Best in	Bedrooms, halls, lounges of ordinary size	Large open living areas, long runs
Subfloor	More forgiving of small dips	Needs a flatter base, dips show at the joins

A 220 mm board can work in a 3.5 metre bedroom, but you end up with fewer boards across the room and more short offcuts at the ends, and it can look oversized. The wide board is best suited to a long open extension, where you see the full length of the boards. If you want both, you can use the same colour in both formats in some cases. Natural Oak, Light Tan, White Smoke, Edgey and Blank come as a plank and as a wide board.

Wide boards are also less forgiving over an old timber floor. A slight hump that a shorter board bridges can leave a wide board sitting proud at its ends. See our wide plank oak guide for Balwyn North for more on that format.

Tones that suit brick and timber interiors

Houses from the 1950s to the 70s often keep some of their original character: exposed brick, a feature fireplace, timber doors or a timber-lined ceiling. Those features pull a floor choice towards warm tones.

• Natural Oak and Light Tan are the safe middle. They sit well with original timber doors and sit comfortably with red or cream brick.
• Caramel Sundae leans more golden and suits a house where the timber joinery is staying.
• Hidalgo is a deeper brown. It looks good against white walls in a bright room but can feel heavy in a dim hall.

If you are gutting the interior and painting everything white, paler boards such as White Smoke become a good option. Grey tones like French Grey or Smoke Grey work best when the kitchen and benchtops lean cool. They can look flat against orange-toned brick.

Whatever you lean towards, take two or three samples home. Put them in the darkest room and the brightest one, and look again after dark. A board that reads mid-brown in the showroom can look noticeably lighter in a north-facing extension.

A sensible order of work

If the floor is part of a bigger renovation, the order matters more than the board.

1. Finish anything that needs access under the house first: rewiring, plumbing, heating ducts, restumping.
2. Sort out the kitchen plan. Decide whether the floor runs under the cabinets or stops at the kicks, and check the dishwasher will still slide out.
3. Have the painters finish ceilings and walls, leaving skirtings for last touch-ups.
4. Lay the floor, including stairs if there are any.
5. Trim the doors, fit scotia or refit skirtings, then do final paint touch-ups.

Moving furniture out and back in is part of the plan too. Rooms need to be empty for the install. If you are living in the house, doing it in two stages, bedrooms first and living areas second, is possible. Please let us know at the measure so we can quote it that way.

Next step: see the boards, then get a measure

Start with the boards. The Camberwell showroom has the oak range on large wall displays, which gives you a better sense of colour and grain than a small sample. Then book a free measure and quote. We lift a carpet corner where we can, check the old floor and the slab, measure the height difference at the extension and give you an itemised quote. You’re welcome to call 1300 690 160 or visit us at 2/1386 Toorak Road, Camberwell.