In case you don’t know, parquet flooring goes way back in history. It’s a bunch of small wooden tiles installed so the grains are at right angles, making an interesting pattern. (Parquet is pronounced “par-kay.” In fact, if you want to spell it parkay, that’s also oquet.)
The first step is to select the type of tile you want to use. There are a lot of different colours available. I recommend you go with a beer-coloured tile, because that’s probably what you’ll be spilling on it most often. Before you start, you must empty the room of all furniture. I know there’s a temptation to save a few bucks by only tiling the open spots on the floor and not doing the areas under the couch and chairs, but you’re not going to get a very tight fit—and if you’re married, chances are the furniture will get moved around a lot, sometimes right out the door.
Once the room is empty, you need to measure the length and width and multiply those together, then divide by the area of a parquet tile. That will give you the number of tiles you need. If, the last time you did your own math, you ended up with thirty-seven extra rolls of non-returnable wallpaper, I suggest you just buy the tiles one box at a time until the floor is done.
Start by placing one tile in the centre of the room. If your room is a perfect square, this is going to be an easy job. Even if it’s a rectangle, you’ll be fine. But chances are it’s a parallelogram—or worse yet, a random quadrilateral where none of the sides is parallel or even straight. So start in the centre and line up one edge of the tile with your favourite wall. A lot of tile manuals tell you to cut and lay the whole floor and then lift it all back up and redo the installation with glue. But depending on your level of patience and concern, and with an eye towards your life expectancy, you may not want to devote that kind of time to something you’re going to walk on with dirty work boots. So I say just glue it down from the get-go. This glue is pretty toxic,so make sure you have plenty of ventilation. If you start humming Jefferson Airplane tunes, chances are you need to open another window.
Moving out from the centre tile, lay each one with the grain going at a ninety-degree angle to the next tile. When it’s all done, the floor will look like the mowing pattern on the infield of Yankee Stadium. You’ll find the job will go like halitosis—everything’s fine until you get close. So as you approach the walls, you will notice that nothing is square and you will have some kind of bizarre extended triangular gap between the last row of tiles and the wall.
Now, if you’re a purist, you can cut all the remaining tiles so that they fit snugly into each of the odd-shaped gaps. I suggest you just put extra glue on the last row so it won’t move, then cover the gap with trim. You may find that the standard quarter round or other trims aren’t wide enough to do the job, but if you go to a lumber salvage place you will find some old-style high baseboard trim from back in the days when a two-by-four was a two-by-four.
These old baseboards were meant to hug the wall and extend eight or nine inches up. For our purposes, we’ll turn them ninety degrees so they hug the floor and extend eight or nine inches out. And you’re done.
Don’t let anybody see your work until you’ve put all the furniture in place. Maybe hang some pictures of good-looking scantily clad women to take the focus away from your flooring job. Hopefully you’ll get some compliments, but if you really want them to swoon, leave the lid off the glue can.