Should You Put Down The Floor Or Walls First

Consider this familiar scenario.

Should you put down the floor or walls first.

The main hesitation that homeowners have in finishing floors before walls is the fear of drips splatters and spills on their new wood or carpet. It isn t critical whether you install flooring or paint the walls first in an empty gutted room but there are a few reasons why installing the flooring first might eliminate potential problems. A professional painting contractor should take proper care in setting up the. Also it s often better to paint the ceilings first especially given that the ladders will rest on the floors.

For example if you switch from a thick carpet to a modern laminate floor your baseboards will need to be lowered by 1 2 or 3 4 of an inch. If time is of the essence it s quicker to hang the drywall and tape out the walls first. One important reason to install new flooring first is that when you change flooring the baseboards will often need to change position. Construction s a messy job and if you install the flooring first you ll spend more time on the walls because you ll have to be more careful not to drip joint compound on a new floor.

Also the lack of baseboards and other floor trim means you can paint all the way down without any masking. In new construction homes where no flooring has been laid yet this is the way it works. If you tile the floor first you may accidentally damage the new floor by dropping things on it. For many people their instinct tells them to paint the walls first so they can eliminate the fear of dripping globs of paint on their gorgeous new floors.

If you are completely renovating a room by breaking down walls or expanding windows it seems likely that you would want to paint first and do the floors after all of the refuse is removed. The general construction rule is to work from the top of the room downward. After the demo it s time to put in new flooring and cabinets. Or difficult to remove mortar drops when tiling the wall.

Why should i do my flooring before i paint my walls. However professional tilers will disagree with this. The ideal is to first do any prep work to the walls e g ripping up wall paper sanding and patching walls etc. This may result in cracked tile.

Walls are put up first then the floor covering comes later. So if you put you subfloor down first it will probably take just as long if not longer to do all the additional measurements to find the plates for accuracy. This problem however can be easily prevented and is not nearly as serious a risk as those involved in painting first. Stud walls need to be installed over double plated floor joices for the extra weight.

The reason for that is that this can damage the floors.