The Cork Floor we had installed in our new home has a few 'bubbles' appearing on the surface of a few of the planks. Is this normal? a defect? an installation mistake? just trying to figure out what the issue is here.
We have the long tongue and groove type planks installed. any advice would help - thanks
Mike
snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote:
How new is the house? If the slab is fairly new it may be that there was still too much moisture still in the slab. If you push on it and it's squishy, that most likely will be water and the floor should not have been put in without a moisture barrier. Especialy since the mat. used is cork. The contractor or sales person should have made you aware of this if they knew the house was new. If it's not moisture it could be a couple of other things. I assume since it is a Cork Floor that it was glued down, if so it is not unheard of for some glues to out-gas a little and that could be it. If that is the case you should be able to push on the bubble with your hand or step on it and it will go down while you have pressure on it. Or there may be a small bit of debri like a tiny pebble or something like that, in that case you would not be able to push it down. 3rd option is that the installer didn't get the floor down properly. If it's the glue out-gassing, a very small hole can be drilled (1/32") into the floor to relive the pressure and MOST of the time the bubble will go down and stay. Then you use a tiny bit of filler to fill in the hold. If it's the rock or debri, you can take a finish hammer (smooth head) and hit it squarely on the hard spot and it'll break up the debri and let the bubble lay down, but you should have the person that installed it do the repair since whatever the cause it is their responsibility to fix the floor they put in and if someone is going to damage it trying to do the repair, it's better if its them since they would have to fix it either way. Good Luck Steve
Just an update to this - It very well could be a moisture issue - we'll find out soon. A rep from the flooring company that did the work is coming over this week. I'm very interested to find out the cause - faulty product? moisture? faulty installation? I'm pretty sure we didn't do anything wrong, so it should be covered under warranty. Note that these planks are not glued down - they're tongue and groove floating style.
Mike
snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com:
Well, if you had it installed, the installer should have done a moisture test. Even the DIY kit they sell where they sell laminate has a test kit. Effective? Who knows?
Their only "point the finger at you" would be that the moisture was OK at the time of install and the excessiveness developed afterwards. Maybe a good time to can a response for that ahead of time.
So the flooring company came in and remedied (temporarily?) the situation by injecting some sort of liquid adhesive into the bubbles and then using a roller to push the bubbles down. We then put some heavy books on the repaired surface for about a day. This is all second hand info as I was at work while this was going on. The flooring guy hadn't had much experience with cork flooring and really had no explanation why it was happening (maybe that's the way the material behaves sometimes?). In general, the floor looks better - but far from perfect (some small bubbling still there - but maybe we just need to flatten it out more since cork has a 'memory'). They volunteered to come do this 'service' whenever we needed it.
Mike
Al Bundy wrote:
replying to TigerFan84, Greenecork wrote: So I know this is an old thread but we had cork flooring problems in 2018. The flooring company tried to blame us for the bubbles - said we used some kind of solvent on the floor. We did not. Eventually, the store that sold us the flooring paid for most of the cost of replacing our entire floor and the manufacturer paid a tiny part, still saying nothing was wrong with their flooring. Fast forward 14 months - the bubbles are starting again. It is the second floor of our home. We will try the above remedy. Thank you for that. Anyway, this has been a bit of a nightmare!
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