I am looking for a flooring transition for tile to hardwood, tile to laminate, and laminate to hardwood. I really do not like the transitions that are raised above the rest of the floor. All of the flooring in my house is exactly flush when it meets. I am wondering if there is some sort of "invisible transition".
Flooring – How to create an “invisible” transition between different flooring types
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You should consider doing something mosaic-y there because the size difference will always prevent you from putting in a milled transition piece.
If you try to install something that looks perfect, it will always look imperfect. But if you go with something that is intentionally imperfect, it will look intentional.
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....
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Best Answer
Solid hardwood is a tough one because unlike the other materials, it expands and shrinks. Laminate and especially engineered hardwoods with a plywood core are much more stable, but they will still expand and shrink a little bit. Certainly more than tile!
I'm in the middle of installing plywood core engineered hardwood in my own house and I have tile transitions. Here's what I'm doing: I'm leaving a 1/2" gap between the tile and the engineered wood and putting grout-colored silicone caulk in it. That way any expansion or contraction of the wood won't cause it to buckle against a more inert material, but there's still a visually-pleasing material in that transition.