BTO Flooring Guide Singapore: What to Lay in Your New Flat

Collecting the keys to a BTO is a strange feeling. The flat is yours, but it is also completely bare: no floor finish, no skirting, just a flat layer of cement screed underfoot and white walls. That blank screed actually works in your favour. Unlike a resale flat, there is no existing tile to hack off and cart away, which is one of the biggest hidden costs in a renovation. As a BCA registered contractor that fits floors across HDB flats, condos and landed homes, here is the honest BTO playbook: what to lay in each room, when in the renovation the floor should go in, and how to avoid paying for the same floor twice.

The BTO advantage: bare screed means no hacking

In a resale flat you usually inherit old tiles, and getting a fresh floor down means hacking those off, disposing of the debris and re-screeding before anything new can be laid. That is messy, noisy work and it adds real money to the bill. A BTO skips all of it. HDB hands the unit over as bare cement screed, so a waterproof vinyl floor can go straight down once the screed is checked and prepared. That makes the install faster, cleaner and cheaper, and it is the single biggest reason flooring a BTO often costs less than a comparable resale flat.

What to lay where

The rule for a BTO is the same one we use for any home: match the material to whether the room is genuinely wet or just occasionally damp. Living rooms, dining areas and bedrooms are dry, so vinyl LVT is the right floor. It is warm, quiet, fully waterproof on the surface and lays fast on bare screed. The kitchen, bathrooms and service yard are genuine wet zones with floor traps, so they get tile over a waterproofing membrane. Mixing the two is normal and sensible. Our kitchen and bathroom flooring guide goes deeper on the wet-area build-up, and the broader HDB flooring guide covers the dry rooms in full.

LN Flooring supplies its own-brand vinyl in six series, from the Core Series at S$3.20 per square foot up to the H Series herringbone at S$4.90 at 5mm with a 0.5mm wear layer, plus the Ultra Series at S$4.80 for a thicker 6.5mm board, all supply and install. For the wet rooms we hack, waterproof, lay and grout porcelain or ceramic tile, quoted per area. One crew handles both, so the whole flat is covered by a single team.

How to time flooring in the renovation sequence

Flooring is one of the last finishes to go in, and getting the order right protects your investment. The rough sequence in a BTO runs like this:

1. Wet works first. Bathroom and kitchen tiling, waterproofing and any plumbing are done early, because they are messy and involve water.
2. Carpentry and built-ins next. Wardrobes, kitchen cabinets and feature walls are fitted before the vinyl, so heavy carpentry is not happening on top of a finished floor.
3. Vinyl flooring goes in late. Once the heavy and messy trades are done, we lay the LVT across the dry rooms. By this point the screed is clean and the floor is one of the last things to be installed.
4. Painting touch-ups and move-in last. Final paint, skirting and cleaning happen after the floor, with the new vinyl protected.

The reason vinyl goes in late is simple: if you lay it too early, other trades still working in the unit will scratch, dent or stain it, and you end up replacing planks before you have even moved in. The projects we have completed all follow this same order.

Avoiding paying twice: common BTO flooring mistakes

The most expensive BTO flooring mistakes come from rushing the schedule, not from the floor itself. A few we see often:

• Laying the floor before the carpentry. If the floor goes down first and built-ins arrive after, you risk dents and scratches, and sometimes the carpenter has to work around a floor that should not have been there yet.
• Putting vinyl in a wet area. Floating vinyl in a bathroom or next to a kitchen floor trap will let water reach the screed. Fixing it means lifting the floor and tiling properly, which is paying twice.
• Not checking the screed first. BTO screed is usually flat, but low spots or cracks should be skimmed and levelled before laying, or the joints can open up later.
• Rushing to lay during the HDB defects period. A new BTO comes with a defects liability period during which HDB rectifies workmanship issues. It is worth letting obvious defects get sorted before the floor covers everything, so you are not lifting a brand new floor to chase a fix underneath it.

Plan the order once and you only pay for the floor once. Our HDB flooring cost guide breaks the numbers down by flat size if you are still budgeting.

Read next

See the full vinyl range on our flooring page, work out the numbers in our HDB flooring cost guide, or read the room-by-room kitchen and bathroom guide for the wet zones. When you are ready, message us your BTO unit details for a quote.