Starting at wall or hallway with floating engineered hardwood floor?

Question

In the planning stages of installing some engineered hardwood flooring, floating. This stuff: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Home-Decorators-Collection-Hand-Scraped-Strand-Woven-Wellington-3-8-in-T-x-5-1-8-in-W-x-36-in-L-Engineered-Click-Bamboo-Flooring-YY2009G/300043018

Our floor layout is as follows:

Flooring will be in the living room and hallway.

Couple of questions:

1. Would you run everything in the same direction, in the living room and hallway, or run the living room the long way, and the hallway the long way?

2. If everything is going the same direction (I would assume in the direction of the hallway) what would be the best method to insure the boards end up going down the hallway parallel to the hallway wall? I could envision the hallway wall and the living room wall being slightly out of parallel, so that if I started at one end of the living room, by the time I get to the hallway, the boards going down the hallway are slightly skewed. I suppose I could start in the middle of the room, but that would require one row of boards to be nailed/glued down, right?

Answer 1

With the hallway leading into the living room and that being a central pathway for people in to that room it becomes a visual CenterPoint. We had a very similar layout at the Church Office where we recently laid flooring.

I would start by snapping a chalk line down the center of the hallway all the way into the living room and start on that line, work backwards from there to one wall, keeping the center line true. Then you can finish from the center forward to the remaining wall. This keeps the center line true and lets the eye follow that flow all the way down the hall.

Answer 2

Where does the light come in?

Usually the longer lines of the floor are parallel to the light.

That's how we had our tiles laid with the light coming in the West window and we had dark tiles to absorb the solar energy in winter, in summer they were shaded.