Flooring, parquet and vinyl in Berlin
Bringing Berlin floorboards and parquet back where they can be saved, and levelling subfloors where they can't.
Berlin has some of the best domestic flooring in Europe sitting under some of the worst carpet in Europe. A good chunk of this work is finding out which you’ve got, and whether the floor under your feet is worth bringing back.
What’s included
Reclaiming and restoring existing floorboards and parquet — lifting, repairing, re-fixing, filling, sanding and finishing. New solid and engineered wood. Vinyl and LVT. Subfloor prep, levelling and screeds. Skirting off, replaced and scribed. And, before any of it, a straight answer about which of those your floor actually needs.
How the job actually runs
- Open it up and look. What’s on top, what’s underneath, what state the boards or joists are in, and how level the whole lot is. Not optional, and often a surprise.
- Sort the subfloor. Loose boards screwed down, damaged sections cut out and replaced, and the whole surface brought within tolerance for whatever’s going on top.
- Acclimatise the material. Wood needs time in the room it’s going to live in before it gets fitted. Skip that and you get gaps opening up in February.
- Fit. Set out to run with the light and the length of the room, with an expansion gap at the perimeter that the skirting covers later.
- Sand, if it’s a timber floor being restored — coarse through to fine, edges and corners done separately, dust extracted rather than spread round the flat.
- Finish. Oil, hardwax or lacquer, depending on how the room gets used and how much maintenance you want.
- Skirting and thresholds, scribed to the floor rather than caulked over a gap.
Berlin floors, and what’s under them
The classic Altbau floor is softwood boards on joists with a fill between them — sand, rubble or building waste, put there for sound and fire separation. Two consequences. It’s heavy and it deflects, which is why rigid finishes crack when they’re laid straight on top. And when you lift boards, that fill is right there, making an enormous amount of dust.
Those boards are often wide, old-growth softwood of a quality you simply can’t buy now. They’re worth saving even when they look dreadful — a century of paint, glue, lino adhesive and carpet gripper hides a lot of good timber. What kills them is thickness. If previous owners have sanded them over and over, there may not be enough left above the nail heads for another pass.
Parquet turns up too, usually herringbone or plain block laid in bitumen. Bringing it back is slow, careful work, especially where blocks are missing and have to be matched, but a restored parquet floor is the single most transformative thing you can do to most Altbau flats.
Level is the recurring problem. A Berlin room dropping 20 or 30mm across its width is completely normal. On a timber floor being restored that’s just character. For LVT, tiles or anything rigid it has to be corrected — and correcting it adds height, which then knocks on to doors, thresholds and where the skirting sits.
How long it takes
Sanding and finishing an existing floor in one room is two to three days, plus curing time before you can use the room. That curing time is real, especially with oil finishes. A whole flat is one to two weeks, and it’s far easier before you move in.
New flooring over a prepared subfloor is one to three days a room. If the subfloor needs levelling first, add drying time for the compound — that can be a day or more on its own before anything gets laid.
What moves the price
- Subfloor condition and level. Same as tiling: the dominant factor, and the one you can’t judge from a photo of the finished surface.
- Reclaim or replace. Restoring is labour, replacing is material. Which works out cheaper depends entirely on what you’ve got.
- Finish and how many coats. Oil, hardwax and lacquer differ in cost, application time and how they age.
- Repairs and matching. Missing parquet blocks and rotten board ends have to be sourced and let in one at a time.
- Room complexity. Bays, thresholds, awkward corners and a lot of skirting to scribe all eat time.
- Whether the flat is empty. Floor work in an occupied flat means moving everything twice.
Lift a corner of whatever’s down now, take a photo and send it over. That one picture usually answers the expensive question.
Common questions
- There are old floorboards under my carpet. Are they worth saving?
- Very often yes, and it's usually the best-value decision in the whole flat. Lift a corner somewhere out of the way and send me a photo — the board width, the gaps and how much of the surface is sound tells me most of what I need to know.
- Can you sand a floor that's already been sanded a few times?
- Depends how much timber is left above the tongue or the nail heads. I check the thickness before committing to it, because sanding through isn't something you can undo.
- Is LVT a reasonable choice in an Altbau?
- It can be a very good one, especially in a kitchen or hallway, and modern LVT is a long way from the vinyl you're picturing. The catch is that it's thin and unforgiving — it telegraphs every bump underneath, so the subfloor prep matters more than which product you pick.
- Will a new floor help with noise from downstairs?
- It can, but only if the whole build-up is designed for it. A floating floor with the right underlay helps. A thin glued-down finish generally doesn't. Tell me early if noise is the point of the job.
Often part of the same job
Apartment renovation
The whole flat, planned and run end to end, with one person answering for it.
Tiling
Walls and floors, big porcelain down to mosaic, on a substrate that's been prepared properly first.
Painting & decorating
The prep is most of the job. Filling, sanding, plaster repair, then paint that actually stays put.