When stalling floating floor without transitions- hallway, dining room, and living room- do you or can you install baseboards in the hallway before completing the other rooms, or is it all installed after ALL flooring is down?
Flooring – Baseboard installation floating floor without transitions
baseboardflooring
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Yes you need to keep expansion room at the walls for the flooring to move. Particularly at the walls that meet the long sides of the flooring, this is where the movement really occurs. In your picture you have the end grain of a piece meeting your transition strip. That will be no concern for movement there, although I would still get a small gap, minimally an 1/8", most certainly not tight, since the wood does move albeit slightly, in its length. That mainly depends on how much "grain runoff" is in any one piece of flooring, an 1/8" should cover it though. This gap at the wood floor/tile junction is caulked with a flexible caulk, something like, but I am not stuck on the Dap 230 in a compatible color of the grout in the tile floor. You are not done yet. Before ANY caulk is done, the joint area is carefully taped off so nothing gets on the adjacent finished surfaces. The caulk is set in place and wiped down to a clean WET joint. while it is wet have the grout on hand that was used to grout the joints in your tile floor and lightly dust the wet caulk so it dries into the caulk. This will give the caulk that varied natural look of grout, instead of the monocolor that caulk alone can't do. Peel the tape immediately after dusting and let dry, then vacuum the excess dust, the rest will remain.
You may decide to use a ready made color matched sanded caulk, that may work, but I have removed this type of caulk before and it is not as flexible as the "230" I mentioned before. No I am not an affiliate of DAP, I just know what works....
The rule of thumb is, "last pieces down are the first and easiest to remove". If the hallway was the last to be laid, it will be an easy pull. That would be the first that needs to pull up. Remove the shoe mold, remove the damaged flooring, you may need to remove some that is not damaged to easily remove it all. Once you see how the first few pieces come up the rest will be easy. It will only be easy to remove in a given direction only. If the room to the right was done last then the removal will need to start with a saw cut at the opening. The replacement may take a glued joint or transition strip to change the direction of the "lay" of the floor.
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Best Answer
I prefer to install the entire floor first and then do the baseboards.
I find that sometimes the floating floor may shift from continuing to install the remainder of the floor, even when using the wedges around the perimeter, and i may have to adjust it some. If the baseboard trim is already in place then there no way to get my adjusting bar in place to pound on it in order to move/adjust the floor.
Also because i prefer to do one task to completion.