Gluing down click-lock hardwood floor

I did speak to a flooring company first and they said $8-10 per square foot, which seems high. HD and Lowes have cheaper options, and I did speak to a person there, but they didn't seem to know much.

Reply to
Jud
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I had around 400 square feet laid but I had to buy a few rolls of very thin foam. I've got about a half roll and maybe a box of the laminate left over and stored away. Thankfully no squeaks at all! I guess the foam underlayment stops that and I'm quite pleased with it. Tongue and groove would have been my first choice but my budget said no, you can't afford it, go with the laminate.

Reply to
ItsJoanNotJoann

You did not tell us in your original post you were installing on a concrete slab. That would have helped IMMENSELY.

Reply to
ItsJoanNotJoann

Glued together T&G may work - not required with Click Lock

Reply to
clare

And look at all the expense and trouble he wants to do, when all he really needs to do is apply a coat of brown enamel paint to the concrete so it matches the color of wood.

Better yet, paint it gray so it looks like concrete!!!!

Or paint it green like a nice mowed lawn!

Reply to
Paintedcow

"Jud" wrote

| I'm not really sure what "float" means, unless it means not fastened | down. | Float means the pieces are attached (glue or CL) but the entire floor sits on a foam pad, held down by the baseboards.

| Just after we moved to this house 14 years ago, we took up the carpet | in two bedrooms and put down engineered T&G hadwood. They glued it to | the concrete slab. If feels solid to walk on (doesn't give) and it | doesn't creak. Now I want to replace the carpet in another room. | | I've looked at three stores, and there seems to be: | 1. Laminate, not real wood. | 2. Engineered wood that is click-lock, doesn't require glue | 3. Engineered wood that is T&G, glued to the concrete slab

Are you sure? I wonder if you might have misunderstood. The glue is generally in the joints, not on the bottom. It's still a floating floor. A plywood floor would move a lot more than the concrete. It might work OK to glue it to plywood, but concrete? The only way I could see that working would be with a rubber cement-type of product that allows for a lot of movement. Maybe it would be worthwhile checking the product sites for spec sheets. But again, if you're hiring a contractor they're going to want to do it their way.

| 4. Solid wood. | | I want something better than laminate, but not too expensive. I don't | want it to give or creak when I walk. I would use a professional | installer. | | The room is just under 150 square feet in size. The ones that did the | floors the first time gave me a price of $8-10 per square foot. |

It wouldn't be hard to do it yourself. Especially with the CL. If you get a nice wood it can look just like solid wood. (Red oak, for instance, usually looks good, while bamboo looks cheap and the dark-stain varieties tend to look like cheap wannabes.) The only tricky part is dealing with doorways and taking up/replacing the baseboard.

Reply to
Mayayana

What does that mean? With glue, without it? With foam, without it?

Reply to
Micky

Yes, exactly, although the floor I saw was done probably before click and lock or laminate was invented. It was a classic hardwood floor, each board about 2" wide, tongue and groove (except for the first or last row where, even if it comes out to be a full board width remaining, the tongue has to be cut off, so the wood will meet the wall). Except by then they had cool machines that held a strip of nails at the proper angle for nailing (into the V just above the tongue) and all they had to do was hit the 3x3" or 4x4" flat target with a heavy rubber? hammer, so the "nails" were put in in one whack. They'd push the board into the groove, then start at one end and whack a nail into place every 2 feet or so, iirc, and could completely do a whole board in the middle of the floor in less than a minute. (they rent these devices now, though I wouldn't count on the rental place to tell you what nails to use, length etc.). At the start of the row every second or 2 out of 3 boards had to be cut in half or a third off** or so so the floor didn't look like a checkerboard. **Even that shouldn't be exact or it will repeat itself too much.

I was there I guess to keep them from stealing something. He certainly has a point but he turned out to be the biggest jerk I ever knew. It took me almost 20 years to figure it out how bad it was. (Like when my girlfriend brought a friend to one of his parties, a very pretty girl, and he had just met her but he felt her up while dancing and she left, of course. In NYC she took a cab or the subway so that wasn't a problem, and I didn't know her well and I don't think she blamed me, but it was still embarrassing; but I told myself, "She can handle herself, and she did." But the last straw was when we went camping and his date and her daughter got shigellosis (though we didn't know what it was then.) The mother had a 101 fever and the daughter 102 or close, but all he cared about was getting back to NYC/Westchester by 10PM Sunday so he could be awake at work the next day, and he didn't want to stop at the doctor/hospital. He said they'd be fine, as if he were a doctor. Well they were fine, and all the hospital did was give them water, by mouth, and watch them for an hour, but he can't know that in advance.

There was an earlier story I never heard the details of, but he was on his motorcycle crossing a bridge, maybe over the Hudson, maybe not -- it had I assumed a steel road surface -- in the rain and he fell and the girl sitting behind him was pretty badly hurt, though I don't know how bad or if anything was permanent - but the problem was that he never uttered a word of regret or suggested he could have driven better, slower so she didnt' get hurt. But I told myself he was feeling that, just didn't share it with me, or had been feeling it deeply months earlier when it had happened.

So back to the camping weekend, what really got me is that he was annoyed that I didn't defer to him in deciding if they went to the hospital or not, because she was HIS girlfriend. Thank goodness it was MY car, and *I* was driving. And I told him, something as a lawyer he should have thought about already, that the reason custom and law is that a husband makes medical decisions for a wife and vice versa is that there is an assumption that the other person's welfare is (almost) as important as the one making the decision, and that he will put a sick spouse's welfare ahead of his own, even though as we all know, many people won't do that for someone more distant (and some people won't do it for anyone.)

But that didn't apply to a girlfriend, especially in his case (explanation upon request). Because, Say the mother or the daughter got asthma and had to move to Arizona (back when that worked). Would he go with them? Not at all. (He probably wouldn't even help them pack.) He's say, Have a good trip, never see them again, and look for another girlfriend. Their welfare was not of sufficient importance to him. It was of greater importance to me. So we fought in the car for

4 hours and spent the last 2 hours in silence, and I think we haven't said 30 words to each other since then.

There were other problem stories. He had the ability to make me think he was doing something crooked even when there was no real evide nce of it. Like one time we put on two performances, charged admission, and raised what must have been hundreds of dollars (in 1966, so a lot of money) and he said it was going to Calvert House, the Catholic whatever on campus. But something about him made me think he was keeping much of the money (that 6 or 8 of us had helped him make. We weren't Catholics but his choice of "charities" was up to him, as long as he gave them the money.) it was difficult to find out how much he gave them, but I did and it seemed he didn't keep any.

But after I got back from Central America and had learned to understand Spanish pretty well, he was a lawyer and he asked me to translate a contract involving his firm's client into Spanish, for $300 iirc, in 1971. That's at least 1000 in today's money and it was fun too, and ego-boosting. He lent me an unabridged Sp. Eng dictionary. And then just as or just after I was starting, he wanted some of the money back, for himself. As a commission, he said. I'm so stupid it took me 30 minutes to be certain that was 'wrong', or better put, I was suspicious right away but couldnt' believe there wasn't some reason it wasn't wrong. Af He said he was paying me what a professional woudl get and I'm a novice. But I'm not that stupid and I told him, Well fine. Hire a professional. I'm not giving you any money. So he went through with the original deal.

It didnt' occur to me until 30 years later, when someone else suggested it, that this would have been illegal. I j ust thought it was unethical.

Now I've heard such a kickback is even illegal, though I don't know if it was in NYS then. Anyone know?

So good riddance to my hard-wood floor ex-friend.

That's something I don't think they did, but perhaps Ididn't get there until 10, and my then-friend went into work late, to see them get started. It surely should have been done too, because it was a Soho loft that had been a printing company, and who knows what had happend to the 8" wide boards that made up the floor.

Reply to
Micky

Thank you for everyone who replied.

I went back to the store and held a piece of T&G and a piece of CL. I had thought that these were basically the same except for how they connect. But the CL is really thin, light-weight, cheap stuff. Now I am sure that CL is NOT what I want!

Reply to
Jud

IF engineered clic dlooring id uded it is NOT to be glued according to the manufacturer and it must have the proper slip pad laid on the subfloor first. Any other installation method voids the warranty.

If T&G engineered hardwood is used, it needs to be glued."together" but NOT to the concrete.. It then becomes a floating floor, just like Clic. If installing the floor over concrete, lay 6 mil plastic sheeting over the concrete and overlap the seams by at least 8" (20cm). I would tape the joints with Tuck Tape as used in regular vapor barior installation. If the concrete is below grade, bring the plastic at least 4" (10cm) up the wall. You will trim it off at the height of the baseboard once the flooring has been installed. Roll out the manufacturer's recommended foam underlayment, but do not overlap the seams The hardwood is applied using regular carpenter's glue in the groove or on the tongue. Clean up with a damp rag as you go.

There IS an aption to glue it down, but few manufacturers recommend it today - and few installers as well. Glue-down installation requires a premium urethane or acrylic wood adhesive be properly troweled over the concrete slab and the engineered wood planks laid into the adhesive and locked together at their tongue and groove joints. Today, the recommended wood adhesives are much more environmentally friendly, but are not cheap and take considerable amount of time to trowel, which will add to the overall labor costs. They are also a real mess to remove if required in the future - and it is NOT RECOMMENDED BELOW GRADE.

Reply to
clare

None of which has anything to do with installing engineered hardwood (or any other flooring) on a concrete slab. . . .

Reply to
clare

The common clic engineered hardwood is 11mm.. The common T&G engineered harswood is 12 or 12.5 MM - some suppliers MAY be as heavy as 13mm . That's half an inch compared to 7/16 click.

A lot of laminate clic is only 6mm or less - I've never seen an engineered hardwod anywhere neer that thin.

Reply to
clare

snipped-for-privacy@snyder.on.ca posted for all of us...

The instructions and research the posters don't want to bother with...

Reply to
Tekkie®

Jud posted for all of us...

Thanks for letting us know that . Did your research there didn't you?

Reply to
Tekkie®

snipped-for-privacy@snyder.on.ca posted for all of us...

Geez, you are sorta anal about doing things correctly...

Reply to
Tekkie®

Do it once - do it right. After the hardwood is down and squeaking it's too late to put in the screws.. Mine had the additional "feature" of the floor joistd not meeting on the steel beam, but overlapping at the beam under where the living room and dining room meet. - a heavy weight in the middle of the dining room caused the cantileveered end to go up in the livingroom, and vise versa. Screwing the plywood subfloor solidly to both sets of joists helped solve that problem too

- along with screwing the joists firmly together where the met and overlapped. Actually it wasn't 100 lbs - I got an extra zero in there by accident..

Reply to
clare

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