FloorTalk – for all the latest flooring fashions

By Steve Cooper

A few weeks ago in her Floor Talk blog, interior designer Annette Callari offered some good advice to consumers in an entry called “DIY Room Designs . . . Don’t Go Too Far.” Beware of the false impressions created by your favorite home-makeover shows on TV, she warned.

Annette’s blog reminded me about a friend who had worked on one of the popular makeover shows. She had lots of war stories to tell. The best story was about a kitchen passageway that was walled off by a frenzied TV crew. It made for good television, but there was a slight downside. By blocking the doorway, the TV remodelers changed the kitchen’s traffic flow—and not for the better. The real reason the designers had boarded up the pass-through? They needed a better angle for their camera and closing off the door gave it to them. After the curtain came down on the production and the TV renovators were long gone, the homeowners were forced to invest in restoration work to reopen the entry.

Don’t be fooled. What you see on TV has been shaped for the viewers, not for real life. There is a point of view called reality and another POV called camera reality. All the rooms you are shown on television or in magazines are limited by what seen is within the camera frame. That’s camera reality. It’s sort of real, but it doesn’t tell the complete story. Disaster may lurk just outside the camera’s view.

Which brings us to your floors. Don’t believe everything you see or read in the media about DIY flooring installations. Homeowners are often encouraged to view DIY installations as an easy task that anyone can tackle. You have the morning free, put down new floors! The truth is that flooring installation is usually best left to professionals. Through training and experience, the pros know how to:

• Work around the edges of a room, making sure that every spot where flooring meets wall has a clean seam.
• Cut around oddities, such as the uneven surface of a fireplace hearth or a tricky jog in a wall. They even know what to do when walls are crooked instead of straight and true.
• Handle difficult transitions between floors of different heights or different materials.
• Work cleanly and efficiently with floor adhesives and/or nails.

Certainly, there are some situations where a homeowner can do an acceptable job with installation. It’s possible for someone with a steady hand and patience to put down a no-nail laminate click floor, for instance, in a small space with straight walls, no tricky changes and no obstacles. However, before you commit to such a project, study the room carefully for any challenge, such as a difficult transition or meandering wall.

In the end, you will enjoy your floors more by bringing in professional installers. You’ll also save money because you won’t have to pay to have your mistakes fixed. The choice is simple: Hire a professional’s experience or go through the angst of gaining you own experience That’s a lesson that a couple of botched flooring installations taught me well.

For more information on flooring visit the World Floor Covering Association’s Consumer Carpet & Flooring Guide.

By Steve Cooper

David Letterman has a gap between his front teeth. So does Madonna. And in his first Rocky movie, Sylvester Stallone gave the boxer some lines about gaps in our lives. “We all have gaps,” he tells his love, Adrian.

However, if you are having new hardwood flooring installed, the last thing you want are gaps. Yet, it’s a potential problem when an installation is botched. The reason? Wood is wood.

Like all wood products, solid hardwood flooring will expand and contract as the temperature and moisture levels change in a house. Extreme swings in these levels may even affect the stability of engineered wood flooring.

Protect against this problem by acclimating new wood flooring to your home prior to installation. Acclimation is simple. It just means that new flooring should be unboxed in your home and left to react to conditions for a week or two. Check with your flooring manufacturers for their specific recommendations for acclimating your type of floor.

While the wood is open to household air, you should keep your home’s temperature and humidity set at its usual levels. You won’t notice it anything happening, but solid wood may expand or contract significantly and there may be some movement with engineered products.

Finally, ask your installer to check the moisture content with a wood moisture meter before starting the job. Proceed with the installation only if the moisture level is within the amount stated by the manufacturer.

If the installer doesn’t pay attention to this issue, gaps may soon appear in your flooring. Better to avoid such a rocky start with new hardwood.

For more information on flooring visit the World Floor Covering Association’s Consumer Carpet & Flooring Guide.

Photo:  Mannington Chesapeake Hickory

Submitted By Steve Cooper

Squeaks, cold, moisture—the flooring challenges in your home may seem insurmountable. But any experienced flooring expert knows to prescribe just the right underlayment. Problem solved.

If your house has any of the following conditions, talk to your flooring installer about a cure:

• Your kids’ bathroom floor is always awash in water and you suspect it may be affecting the floor.

• Too much noise on floors upstairs can be heard downstairs.

• The house was built on a concrete slab and you have reason to expect cracks will soon appear in the concrete. In turn, cracks would impact your wood, laminate, stone or tile floor.

• Wearing socks and slippers throughout winter is the only defense against frostbite from cold floors.

• The subfloor in your home is more like a roller coaster of hills and valleys.

• You plan to install a laminate floor as a DIY project and want it to perform as if a pro put it down.

All these conditions and more can be corrected with the proper underlayment. Tell a flooring professional all about your concerns. Only by full disclosure can you get the right type of material to solve the problem.

You’ll be introduced to several product choices. There is usually a good, better and best solution to consider. A good solution should do a reasonable job at a low price. A better solution will almost always be a total cure. And the best solutions offer a combination of characteristics that promise impressive results. For instance, you may just want to have warmer feet, but the best underlayments may add moisture control and great sound deadening in addition to superior insulation against heat loss. 

For more information on flooring visit the World Floor Covering Association’s Consumer Carpet & Flooring Guide.

Submitted by Steve Cooper

Molding for transition from one flooring material to another appears inconsequential. It hardly seems worth a blog post. That is, until you walk barefoot over a threshold that has been poorly designed. How does a bad transition make you yelp or squirm? Let’s count the ways.

1. Too narrow

2. Too high

3. A too-sharp edge

4. Splinters

5. Nails

You’ll know what’s wrong the minute you step on it. Your foot may glide across the transition but get creased by a sharp back edge. A nailhead may snag your stocking. Or the width will be so narrow that it’s slightly painful if the molding is stepped on squarely.

Wood-molding remedies are easy as long as the design gets attention prior to installation. Don’t let one be made so tall that you can stub your toe on it. Instead, have it built at least 3 inches wide, tapering down at each side. A 6- to 8-inch-wide transition may seem excessive, but it provides comfort. All nails should be set and the holes filled. For screws, countersink holes to eliminate a potential hazard.

If you are using metal or any other material for the thresholds, check for comfort before installtion by testing it with bare feet. Make sure no screw heads will be sticking up.

Let your installer know that you are concerned about comfort at transition points. This often goes unmentioned and, since molding is the last item during installation, it does not always get the attention it needs.

For more information on flooring visit the World Floor Covering Association’s Consumer Carpet & Flooring Guide.

For those of you out there that don’t find floor covering fascinating and spend your weekends on Google to learn all you can about floors, here’s a run down of the basics. This information may help you understand about your options and what you need to know when you decide you want new floors.

1. The main categories of flooring are:

Carpet

Vinyl or Resilient Flooring

Hardwood

Laminate

Ceramic or Porcelain Tile

Natural Stone

To learn more about these categories and to see different styles see the information outlined on our parent site or just click on the link above.

2. Technology and design styles have had significant influence on flooring. Other than the basics flooring types listed above, there are also styles of cork flooring, bamboo flooring, glass tiles, stainless and other metal tiles, rubber tiles, natural fibers like seagrass and sisal and many others – even paper!

3. Not all floors are acceptable on all foundation types.  For example, most solid hardwood floors cannot be installed on concrete slabs. Be sure to know your foundation type before you start shopping.

4. Flooring is measured and sold either by the square foot or the square yard. Be careful when comparing prices that you are comparing apples to apples. If a hardwood tag says “$4 per SF” and a carpet tag says “$18 per SY” and you don’t see the one letter than distinguishes the two, you might think the hardwood is less expensive than the carpet.

5. Allow a retailer give you an estimate on your room size to determine how much flooring you will need rather than building your budget from your own measurements. For example, if you have a room that is 13′ x 13′ you will need different quantities for different flooring materials. Some items are sold by the box and carpet and vinyl are sold from a roll that could be 12′, 13′6″ or 15′ wide. Since you have to buy items that are sold by the box by the full box (and take the waste factor, pattern match and pattern repeat into consideration) and items sold on a roll by their given width you could need anywhere from 190 SF over 300 SF for a room that actually measures 169 SF.

6. Different floors are made for different lifestyles. For example: You may love hardwood, but if you have large dogs hardwood may not be the best choice for you. If you have dark hair, white bathroom floor tiles might not be the best choice for you.  If you have small children and pets, white carpet may not be the best choice for you.

7.  Keep transitions to other rooms in mind when choosing flooring. Floors have different finish heights and those heights can vary depending on your subfloor. Floors with different finish heights will need to be treated with a transition strip. Transitioning from a (low) vinyl/resilient floor to a 3/4″ solid hardwood floor can be significant. Transition strips are no big deal, if you know in advance to expect them.

8.  Keep resale in mind. Because floors like hardwood, ceramic tile and natural stone are costly and rarely need replacing due to wear, consider how long you are going to live in your home before choosing your floors.  Your favorite color may be blue, but a house full of blue floors may be a turn off to a potential buyer. If you do choose to express your style with a house full of blue floors, be sure that you won’t tire of looking at the same color after a while. However, I am definitely not suggesting choosing all beige floors for resale purposes!

9. It is important to consider maintenance. If you don’t like to clean, there are flooring options with very little maintenance that also stand up to heavy traffic and pets.

10. Floors come in a variety of different styles and that means that they also come with different budgets. Be careful when shopping that you don’t rule out a particular flooring type because of the first priced sample you see. There are some vinyl floors that are as expensive as a hardwood floor and there are prices ranges within each type of flooring that can be as much as $20 per square foot.

The floors in your home are a big decision. They take more wear and tear than most any other item in your home. Other than your walls, your floors consume the majority of the square footage in your home. Choose a floor type based on the fact that you will probably live with it for a very long time!