When you buy a new wood floor, you also need to get certain other accessories along with it. These trims and mouldings are what will give your floor a professional-looking finish, with no blunt edges or exposed areas distracting from the natural beauty of the floor itself.

Wood floor mouldings, or transitional mouldings, are amongst the most important accessories you will need to buy. If you’ve never bought a wooden floor before, however, you might not have a clue what mouldings are or what they do. Here is a quick rundown of a few different types of mouldings along with reasons why you might need them:

• Reducer moulding. If there are two different heights of floor within a space (i.e. where the end of the wood floor in a room meets a lower floor covering such as lino / vinyl ), you will need to fit reducer moulding to even out this height difference and stop anyone from tripping over when moving from room to room.

• T-moulding. This T-shaped moulding is used where two different floor types of the same height, but perhaps with differing materials or wood species, meet. It is used to add a professional finish to a flooring job and to fill any gap between two floors.

• L-section. This is used where the wooden floor may come up against something that is higher than the wood floor (i.e. around a fireplace heath of up to patio doors)

• Nosing. This is used to form a smooth edge to the front part of staircase treads.

• Quadrant / Scotia. This is used around the perimeter of the room to cover the expansion gap (unless the skirting board is to be fitted after the floor, then you will not require this trim).