A floating floor ( a low cost product, brand unknown) is buckling on one seam in a house built for Habitat for Humanity. The buckling is at the end of a course that comes up against tile. The course is in the middle of the room (24′ wide).
Is there a way to determine where the expansion is being blocked or in what direction without having to remove all the baseboard?
This floor was put down before the K cabinets were installed.
Any suggestions are welcome. Thank you
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Replies
One would guess that expansion is being blocked by the tile.
Not without your x-ray glasses. If you hasppen to have left yours in storage, then pull the damn base to find out where the floor is not being allowed to "float". What's to lose, a few finish nails, a caulk joint, and a touch up paint job? Heck you have a buckled floor to fix anyhow.
The predominant expansion should generally be allowed in the axis parallel to the length of the planking. Composits should alllowed for expansion at ends of planking as well. If you don't have a manufacturers installaion guide, thenfind a floor that is very similar in compostion to yours online or a box store and research those guidelines. They should be similar enough to go by.
BTW, this is the worst time of year in terms of finished wood products taking on ambiant moisture within a home. Boards will likely be at there widest dimension. If your Habitat home is poorly conditioned in terms of relative humidity, then you should allow for that bwith respect to both expansion and contraction.
im assuming the baseboards have shoe molding, i would look at the shoe molding and make sure that they didnt nail the shoe/quarter round straign down, nailing the floating floor at the same time. if this was the case, that and the tile would cause something like what your seeing. who put the floor down? why arent they fixing it?
Come on Mark. You don't really belive your shoe mold theory, do you?
The force of expanding wood far exceeds the shear value of a few meager brad nails. Remember your history: The Egyptians split solid granite into slabs by driving wood wedges into a series of drilled holes. After the wedges were driven tight, they were all soaked with water enought to provide the necessary hydraulic splitting pressure to make slabs. Granted, a floating floor is not restrained on all sides like a circular bore, but it does take a fair amount of force to buckle a floor out of plane and toward the path of least resistance-which in this case is up. More than errent brads have to offer.
Keep in mind, also, that the brads likely weren't long enough to penetrate the subfloor which means that any errent brads would have been acting as mini cantilevered beams rather than posts and beams. The brads would have easily failed in bending before they even had a chance to be challenged by the floating floor in shear.
The shear value of a field of thinset tile restraining one side of the floor is substantial and should easily be enough to restrain one side of an expanding floating floor. The other restraing force preventing this floor from "floating", however, sounds to me like it has to be a framed wall. In other words, since tile-to-wood transition was probably installed tight for aethestic reasons, the total expansion allowance had to be made up on a single, opposite wall. Evidently it was not enough.
absolutely
once again you are injecting your out of touch opinion.
I pull base and shoe molding that have 2'1/4 finish nails all the time. I also pull shoe molding that instead of being nailed to the base is nailed straigh down.
4. Do not nail moldings or transitions into the floating floor – Moldings and Transition pieces must be nailed or fastened into the wall or substrate, not into the flooring. Nailing or fastening through the floating floor creates a pinch point and will cause a buckling failure. When floating vinyl sheet floors were first introduced to the builder market the sheet flooring was installed first, then the carpet installers came in and nailed Z-Bar and tack strip into the sheet flooring which lead to the vinyl floor buckling. Unfortunately for the vinyl installer, they were blamed for the buckles and had to fix them at their time and expense.
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24 feet?
That's a wide floor. Lots of potential for expansion there, but the first place I'd look is where it abuts the tile. But as Deadnuts said, you'll have to pull some base. Odds are the flooring is tight to the plates in more than one area.
The other question you should ask is whether this expansion is due to summer humidity, or if there's literally an underlying moisture problem. Do you know if there's a vapor retarder below the flooring (a good thing)? What's the substrate? Slab? Framed floor over a crawl or a basement? Are there moisture issues there?
floating what kind of floor?
Sometimes floating floors are actually made of wood but usually what I see is plastic laminate.
They behave differently. The plastic expands sort of the same in both directions, wood mostly moves in width. Wood changes mostly do to moisture changes, I assume plastic is mostly affected by temperature changes.
I've long been under the opinion that you should never put cabinets on top of a floating floor.
From your description of this case it does sound like you need to remove the base where you most expect it to be binding. I know, most of us hate to go backwards but replacing and patching up the base will likely be less troublesome than imagined.
If you find that the flooring is hitting the wall maybe you can trim it in place with a multi tool or some such and solve a sticky problem pretty easy.