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The Floorlayer of the Year competition was the closest for years

As the Floorlayer of the Year Competition got underway at The Flooring Show last month, each of the five finalists started by unveiling the artwork they had done to meet the Judges’ Challenge. They had been given a piece of flooring-grade plywood and two different colours of LVT tiles and were asked to create a design on the theme of sport. This meant that from the outset there was some remarkable work on display.

The five finalists worked on five identical platforms, with the same flooring and with the same brief. The only two variants were that each was using a different sponsor’s adhesive and they could each decide the width of their LVT border and include a freestyle element around one corner if they wished to and had the time.

Over two days the platforms were fitted with LVT in a herringbone design with a border on the right-hand half.

There were plenty of obstacles to make things more challenging: curved walls, uneven wall finishes, radiator pipes and a raised heart motif to cut around.

As the work began, each finalist seemed to start in a different way and for a time it appeared that some were well ahead of their rivals, but in fact as the 13 hours of competition drew towards an end, they were all within minutes of each other and every finalist finished the platform.

The competition drew good crowds, and at times the aisle was blocked with attendees straining to work out who was winning, or pondering how the judges were going to be able to pick a winner, as all the platforms were of an exceptional standard.

The judges were watching carefully throughout the two-day event to see how the fitters did their marking out, cutting in and bonding of the tiles. Then when the time was up, we spent almost two hours looking at each platform in detail and marking the finished results for alignment, cutting, gaps and appearance. Any of the fitters would have delighted their customers, and it was only by being exceptionally critical that we could differentiate between each one to give varying scores for each element.

The final results were very close, in fact the scores were the tightest I have known in the seven years I have been involved as a judge. The winner, by a narrow margin, was Dean Dickinson of Marston Flooring, near Bedford, and the winner of the Judges’ Challenge was Daniel Jones of Oxford.

Next year the competition will be for carpet fitters again. You can put your name down by going to the NICF website (www.nicfltd.org.uk), or watch for the entry form in this magazine. Visit: www.richard-renouf.com