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When Flooring Goes In on a New Home: The Order Against Drywall, Paint, Cabinets, Trim, Stairs and Carpet, and Why Each Step Waits for the One Before
Flooring & Tile
When the Floors Go In: The Order of Flooring Against Everything Else in a New House, and the Reason Behind Each Step
On a new house the floor is one of the last things in and one of the first things damaged, so every builder has a sequence, and most of the sequence is about keeping other trades off the finished floor and keeping water out of it. The order is not sacred; I have changed it when a cabinet delivery slipped or a slab would not dry. But every change costs something, and knowing why each step is where it is lets you see what it costs. Here is how a house I build goes from drywall to carpet, and where the common shortcuts bite.
The sequence
| Step | What happens | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Drywall taped, sanded, primed | All the dust-making is done. Ceilings and walls get their prime coat and often the first finish coat. | Sanding dust gets into every joint of a floor laid too early, and primer splatters. The drywall and paint order. |
| 2. Heat on, house dried, moisture tested | The furnace or the slab heat runs for weeks. The slab and subfloor are tested: concrete under 75% RH or 3 lb MVER, wood within 4 points of the flooring. | A new house holds hundreds of litres of water in the concrete, framing and drywall compound. Flooring laid into that swells, cups or lifts. |
| 3. Hardwood delivered and acclimated | Boxes opened and spread in the rooms for 5 to 7 days at living temperature and humidity. | The wood meets the house before it is nailed to it. The five to seven days. |
| 4. Tile floors in bathrooms, laundry, foyer | Membrane, tile, grout, before vanities, toilets and the washer. | Tile goes under the vanity and up to the tub so the floor is continuous and a vanity can be changed later without a hole in the floor. |
| 5. Hardwood, nailed or glued | Main floor and upper hall. Protected with paper the day it is finished. | Before cabinets when the floor runs under them, see below. Before trim so the baseboard sits on the floor. |
| 6. Kitchen cabinets and islands | Set on the hardwood, or on the subfloor with the floor cut around them. | Decided by the floor type; the one argument in the sequence. |
| 7. Interior trim: baseboard, casing, doors | Baseboard on the hardwood with the expansion gap under it. | A floor laid after trim gets quarter-round, which looks like a renovation on a new house. |
| 8. Floating floors: LVP, laminate | Bedrooms, basement. Before baseboard where possible, or with the baseboard set 3/8 in. high. | A floating floor needs a free edge; baseboard nailed through it pins it. |
| 9. Stairs | Treads and risers over the construction stringers that the trades have been walking on. | Last of the hard surfaces, because every trade and every box of tile has gone up them. What the treads cost. |
| 10. Final paint, then carpet | Finish coats on walls and trim, then carpet and pad, then the last touch-up. | Carpet is the easiest floor to ruin and the hardest to clean; it goes in when everyone else has left. |
Cabinets before or after the hardwood
This is the one builders argue about in the coffee shop. Hardwood first, cabinets on top: the floor is continuous, the kickplates sit on it, any future kitchen fits, and you pay for 40 or 50 square feet of oak nobody will see, about $540 at $10.75 installed. Cabinets first, floor cut around: you save that money, the dishwasher may not come out past a floor that is now 3/4 in. higher than the floor it sits on, and when the kitchen is replaced in twenty years the new one does not match the hole. I put the hardwood under the cabinets on every house. The dishwasher argument alone settles it.
For a floating floor the answer flips. A floating floor under an island or a bank of cabinets is pinned, and a pinned floating floor peaks somewhere else in the room within a year. Cabinets go on the subfloor, the floating floor is cut around them with its gap, and the kickplate covers the gap. Tile is a third answer: tile under the cabinets is fine and common, but it is $15.75 a square foot you do not see, and most builders tile to the kick line and stop.
The slab, if there is one
The houses I build sit on heated concrete slabs, basement and slab-on-grade, with hydronic tubing in the concrete, and flooring over a slab adds a step and a wait that a framed floor does not have. New concrete gives up water for months. The rule of thumb is a month of drying per inch of thickness in good conditions, and our conditions, a closed-up house in a Georgian Bay November, are not good. So the slab heat goes on as soon as the system can run, weeks before any flooring, which dries the slab and brings it to the temperature the floor will live at. Then it gets tested, with a probe, not a hand. Then the floor goes down and the thermostat is raised a couple of degrees a day until the surface is where it will stay, which on our slabs is 30 to 37 C; the flooring sheets say 27 to 29 C, and that gap is a conversation to have with the client before the floor goes in, not after. How we build the slab and sequence the floor is the long version; the ICF houses themselves are at ICFhome.ca.
What the whole house comes to, in order
A 2,000 sq ft house at mid grade, 900 sq ft of engineered hardwood, 500 of LVP in the bedrooms, 300 of porcelain in the wet rooms and foyer and 300 of carpet, is about $21,000 installed before stairs. Add 14 oak treads at $150, $2,100, and a tiled ensuite shower at about $3,800, and the flooring package is about $27,000 before HST, $30,500 with. Production builders carry $4 to $6 a square foot in the allowance for that same house, which buys builder-grade LVP throughout and nothing else; the gap between the allowance and the number above is the upgrade conversation. What the allowance buys and how to negotiate it.
Where the sequence goes wrong
- Flooring laid to make a closing date. The drywall is still damp, the slab is at 85% RH and the hardwood has been in the house two days. It looks fine at the walk-through and it gaps, cups or peaks by the first anniversary, which is also when the installer warranty runs out, and the manufacturer calls it a site condition.
- Trades on the finished floor. The hardwood goes in, nobody papers it, and the painter’s ladder, the electrician’s bucket and the cabinet installer’s cart do what they do. Protection is $0.10 a square foot and a day. Skipping it is a board replacement at the installer’s minimum.
- Baseboard nailed through a floating floor. The trim carpenter did not know, or did not care, and the floor is now pinned on two walls. It peaks at the hall doorway in July.
- Toilets and vanities set before the tile. Then the tile is cut around them, the floor has a hole under every fixture, and the first vanity change exposes subfloor. Tile first, always.
- Stairs finished early. Fourteen stained oak treads at $150 each, walked on by every trade for three weeks with grit on their boots. Stairs go in last, or they get a plywood cover screwed over them the day they are done.
Questions people ask
Does hardwood go in before or after kitchen cabinets?
Before, on the houses I build, so the floor runs under the cabinets, the dishwasher can come out and a future kitchen fits. It costs about 40 to 50 sq ft of flooring nobody sees. Floating floors are the exception: cabinets first, floor cut around them with a gap.
Should flooring be installed before or after painting?
After the drywall is primed and usually first-coated, before the final coat. The dust and the splatter are done before the floor arrives; the final coat and the touch-up happen after the baseboard is on the floor.
Is baseboard installed before or after flooring?
After hardwood and tile, sitting on the floor with the expansion gap hidden under it. For floating floors, after too if the schedule allows, or set 3/8 in. above the subfloor so the floor slides under it, and never nailed through the floor.
How long after drywall can you install hardwood?
When the subfloor moisture is within 4 points of the flooring and the house has been at living temperature and humidity long enough for the wood to acclimate 5 to 7 days. In a winter build that can be three or four weeks after the taping, with the heat running the whole time.
When does carpet go in on a new house?
Last. After the final paint coat, after the stairs, after every other trade has carried its last box through the front door. The carpet installer and the cleaners are the final two trucks in the driveway.
Price the house room by room
The flooring cost calculator takes the whole house, any mix of materials, stairs included, and gives you the number to hold against the builder’s allowance. If you have plans and want the quantities done properly, the $249 takeoff measures every room from the drawings, and the $99 quote review reads the builder’s upgrade sheet.
Sources and further reading
- National Wood Flooring Association: the installation guidelines every hardwood warranty points to: subfloor flatness, moisture limits, acclimation, fastening schedules and the radiant-heat chapter.
- Tarion warranty coverage: what a new-home warranty covers for flooring gaps, cupping, cracked tile and squeaks in year one and year two, and the Construction Performance Guidelines it measures them by.
- ICFhome.ca: where I build the ICF houses and heated slabs these details come from.
