Direction of floor planks

[Sorbustree123]

For a knocked through front and back room downstairs - would floor planks look best running front to back (with the main direction of travel) or side to side (to help the house feel wider, as it's relatively narrow)? All thoughts welcome. Thanks!

I prefer them running in the direction of travel ie lengthways usually. But having said that, we did deliberately do one of our rooms the other way because it matched the rest of the rooms that all lead off the central hallway iygwim?

We’ve recently had amtico fitted. Rule of thumb is that boards/patterns run from front to back of a house, so that is the way we’ve laid our hall and rear reception room. But we laid out front reception side to side (the width of the room) as the room is wider than it is long. It’s a basket weave pattern, so there isn’t a huge difference between side to side and front to back, but the rule of thumb would be front to back.

I also think main direction of travel ie lengthways. Will also be cheaper I should think.

How narrow is it? How many planks would fit side to side?

Should have added to above comment.
Say if two planks fill the width there’ll be a lot of cutting so you’ll have a lot of waste.

I agree with direction of travel

Just to throw a spanner in the works: DIAGONAL?

Hmm, we've laid all our side to side not front onto back as we went for the 'looks wider' option. Makes no noticeable difference tbh!

I’d do them side to side.

Agree front to back if between those options. We chose herringbone for ours though and I love it

The difference for me was that in our hallway, putting the planks sideways would have made it look like a ladder on the floor! So that was what decided it for me.

Convention says they go end on to your Windows, according to our builders, but we did the opposite and it looks much better. Personally I wanted diagonal but the builders refused to do it because of all the cuts.
I prefer side to side because I think it looks nicer. We also did a layout of thirds so each plank is laid one third along the adjoining plank. It looks really nice.

I did lots of things our builders raised eyebrows at but they always said afterwards how good it looked. Don't be afraid to be different.

it's not convention.

it's construction engineering.

floorboards go at right-angles to the floor joists. They have to go across them. Floor joists are relatively expensive, and have to be deeper and more expensive the greater the span. So in a rectangular room the joists are laid the shorter way between the walls.

The floorboard therefore run the longer way.

The ‘rule’ is apparently to run them from the main source of light. We’ve had both directions in the same space and haven’t noticed a difference with a room feeling wider / less wide. I prefer them laid with the source of light.