How to finish laminate flooring around a fireplace hearth
Installing floating laminate or LVP up to a fireplace means you cannot maintain a standard quarter-inch expansion gap against irregular brick or tile. Skipping this gap creates anxiety about floor buckling, while using a transition strip or scribing leaves tricky edges around the hearth.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Cutting the laminate around the tile and using a transition piece or stair nose
- 2Running the laminate right up to the front of the fireplace to cover the tile
- 3Putting a transition piece around the perimeter of the fireplace
- 4Undercutting the brick using a diamond blade, special tool, or angle grinder to maintain the expansion gap
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Originally I was thinking of cutting the laminate around the tile on the floor and using a transition or stair nose or something to finish the edge, but since we don't plan on using the fireplace would it be wrong to run the laminate right up to the front of the fireplace and cover the ugly tile? How would you handle the laminate around the fireplace?”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
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