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Direct-stick means the boards are bonded to the base with a flexible adhesive across the whole floor. It feels solid, sounds solid, has no underlay to fail, and transmits less noise to the room below. It also commits you: the adhesive is the reason the floor cannot easily be lifted, and it is entirely dependent on the base being dry, clean and sound.

Floating means the boards lock to each other and lie loose over an underlay, held only by the perimeter. It is faster, tolerant of a base that cannot be made perfect, and removable. It also sounds hollower, needs a continuous expansion gap around every fixed object, and turns any dip in the base into a spot where the floor flexes and the joints work.

What usually settles the argument is the slab. A ground-floor slab in Australia sits on soil, and the ABCB Housing Provisions require a vapour barrier of 0.2 mm nominal thickness polyethylene film beneath it, lapped not less than 200 mm at all joints and taped or sealed with a close-fitting sleeve around every service penetration, extending under internal and edge beams to finish at ground level. On an older house you cannot assume that membrane is intact or was ever installed to that specification, which is why a moisture reading taken to the adhesive manufacturer's method — not a look and a feel — is what decides whether direct-stick is available to you at all.

The Illegal Logging Prohibition Act 2012 is Commonwealth law. It makes it an offence to import illegally logged timber and to import regulated timber products containing it, and it places a due diligence obligation on the importer: section 13A requires a due diligence system to be in place before regulated timber products are imported. Separate provisions cover the processing of raw logs domestically, and the Secretary can require an importer to produce information and documents.

That matters to a homeowner for a practical reason rather than a moral one. It means there is paperwork. An importer who has done the work has records of species, country of harvest and the risk assessment they ran, and a reputable supplier can get to them. A supplier who cannot tell you the botanical species or the country of harvest of the timber on top of the board is telling you something about the chain they buy through.

Ask for both by name, in writing, on the quote. Species matters anyway — it sets hardness, how the colour shifts under Australian sun and whether a future repair can be matched — so you are asking for something you need for other reasons, and the answer doubles as evidence that someone upstream did the work the Act requires.

Preparation first, and it is most of the job. The base is checked for moisture to the method the adhesive or flooring manufacturer specifies, ground where it is high and filled with a levelling compound where it is low, then cleaned back to a sound surface. A slab is finished to a building tolerance, not a flooring tolerance, so this is ordinary work rather than an extra, and a quote that says nothing about it has priced the easy version.

Then acclimatisation, which is not a ritual. Boards delivered from a coastal warehouse into a dry inland house will change dimension, and the point is to get that change over with before the boards are fixed rather than after. The installer should say how long, in what conditions, and with the packs opened or closed — the manufacturer's instruction, not a rule of thumb.

Setting out comes next, and it is where a good installer earns the fee. The direction of the boards, where the starting line sits so the last board is not a sliver, where the expansion gap runs and how it will be covered, where breaks go at doorways, and how the floor meets tile, carpet and the front door threshold. The perimeter gap is structural, not cosmetic: a floating floor with its gap filled at one wall will lift in the middle of the room the first humid week it gets.

Queensland names it directly. The QBCC's floor finishing and covering (hard sector) licence class lists installing pre-finished manufactured and engineered timber flooring in its published scope of work, alongside sanding and coating timber floors and installing and repairing non-structural strip timber flooring. If the contractor also intends to do work outside that class beyond a small incidental value cap, they need the additional licence.

New South Wales approaches it from the other end: Service NSW's licence check exists because a licence is required for people doing residential building work as well as the occupational trades, and the check will tell you what a particular contractor is authorised to do. The other states each have their own regulator and their own thresholds, so the reliable habit is the same everywhere — get the licence number, check it yourself, and ask the contractor which class it is.

It is worth doing even though laying a floating floor is not dangerous work. The licence is the thread that connects to the statutory home warranty schemes and to the dispute bodies, and a contractor who is not licensed for the work is also usually outside the cover you would want when a floor cups a year later.

A comparable engineered flooring quote names the product, the wear layer thickness in millimetres, the fixing method, the underlay if any, the preparation allowed for and what happens if the moisture reading comes back high. That last item is the one that turns a fixed price into a variation halfway through, so ask for it to be priced as an option rather than left open.

The Australian Consumer Law sits behind all of it. The ACCC sets out the guarantees that apply to goods and to services, and a floor sold as suitable for direct-stick over a slab, or as sandable, has been described in a way that has to be true. Keep the quote, the product documentation and the species and origin information together, because those are the documents that make a claim straightforward rather than a memory contest.

On LokalMatch, give every installer the same brief: the area in square metres, whether the base is a slab or a suspended timber floor, the age of the house, the rooms involved and whether you want direct-stick or floating. Ask each of them to state the wear layer and total thickness of the board they are quoting. Quotes that look identical on price often separate completely on that one line.