I would not suggest you start cutting and laying the flooring around your appliances, as these do change from time to time and will in most instances not match the footprint of your old items. What do you do then? Rip up all your floating floor and re-do, do a patch job that will look just plain bad or pull up the floor in those areas, maybe lay tiles and keep floating floor to living rooms - too many variables - none of them good ones to have to deal with. Sorry I can't help you with any Canberra trades as I'm in Melbourne. Good luck with the project. Cheers, Michelle

We had laminate floating floors for 7 years, when purchased was told they were high quality and commercial grade 20 year warranty, and were laid by the store. We have just replaced them with vynal plank so happy, the laminate had worn terribly at the edges and scratched every where, very noisy even with under lay, and so painful to keep clean with spraying with a water metho mix wiping and then drying and they still lifted at the edge. Would never put laminate down again. We might have got a bad batch and we did try to claim on warranty but the store argued it was water damage and would do nothing. When we pulled them up the underlay had no marks on it from water.

Email Houzz and ask them to move this post to the Design Dilemma thread. You'll get more responses.

HI Demelza If engineered timber is to be floated, then a 2mm dampscreen underlay should be installed. I have not heard of engineered flooring being nailed down, but if you are wanting to "fix" to the subfloor, then you will need a moisture barrier over the sub floor before it is glued - (generally how we do things here in NZ). The timber attracts moisture, so with either a moisture barrier or dampscreen underlay, the intention is to prevent the moisture from penetrating the timber. Depending on which product you are looking at, there is plenty of information on their websites which will help.