I’ve got a wood flooring problem on a job, and am wondering if any experienced floor installers can give me some feedback. I’ve installed a fair amount of flooring over the last 30 years but never run into this.
On a recent remodel/addition job we installed about 900 sq.ft of pre-finished red oak 3/4″ x 3 1/4″ flooring over 15 lb. felt paper, over 3/4″ Advantec subfloor. We used a pnuematic floor stapler, {a brand new rental unit,} that was correctly set for the depth of flooring. Everything looked great when done. About a month later, when the family moved in, they called about a problem with the flooring. When looking at the flooring in the right lighting, { low sunlight, with your eyes down near the flooring, there was noticible puckering at some boards along the edges that you could also feel if you ran your finger along the surface. This is not on all flooring, just some random areas, perhaps 5-10% of total area. I called manufacturer, was told it was an installation problem. I ordered some more flooring, and agreed to cut out and replace bad pieces. We replace about three full cartons worth of boards. Upon examining edges it did appear that the dimples were on the sides of the staples where the contact plate of the stapler meets the flooring to tighten the flooring when struck with the mallet. It seems the wood edges have compressed causing the pucker or bulge. Now the customer has notice some other areas that we didn’t see before and is asking us to replace entire foor area wich would be very difficult as it runs through three rooms, under kitchen cabinets, family room built-ins, baseboards, door jambs, etc. He feels the the integrity of the floor is ruined by our method of replacement.
I am willing to go back and replace the additional boards but not rip out and replace the whole floor as most of it is fine. My main questions are, has anyone seen this problem, and is there a better way of replacing boards than we are using? We are ripping bad boards down the center in two places, chiseling out the center, then carefully removing the rest of the board. Cut out the felt paper underneath, rip the bottom edge off the groove side and end, and gluing back in place with PL brand polyurethane construction adhesive. My experience with this glue has been great. We hven’t had to do any face nailing to speak of other than an occasional pin nail to hold until glue sets if a board isn’t perfectly flat.
Thanks for any info,
Bish
Replies
I've installed pre-oiled larch with a floor nailer and never had any problems with dimpling from the machine compressing the wood. You say this was red oak; that's a lot harder than larch, to say the least. Unless one of your guys was really mad at the IRS that day and was hitting the nailer as hard as he'd liked to have hit the auditor, I can't see how a serious dimpling problem could have occurred.
The customer does sound like a whiner from your description. If you have to turn the lights down low and stick your face down on the floor to see a problem, it doesn't seem to me that a complete tear out is justified.
Replace any new dimpled boards you found on round two, but make the customer sign off forever on that floor before you do that. Then dump him. If he crawls around with his face on the floor looking for dings, his next trick will be to hold up a 10-foot straightedge to the gyprock to find the butt joints....
Dinosaur
A day may come when the courage of men fails,when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship...
But it is not this day.
I have seen that, done it myself hitting the nailer too hard, if worst comes to worst refinish the floor. A good sanding should take out the puckering you have described. Have a floor finisher look at it, don't take anymore out until you do that.
Thanks for the input guys. I actually did most of the install myself, and wasn't too tee'd off at anyone that I can recall. Seriously, I wasn't swinging very hard at all, but I guess maybe I don't know my own strength. As for sanding and refinishing, they don't want to do that because the flooring came with that aluminum oxide type finish with a 20 year wear warranty. I'm still pushing for replacing what's bad. Does anyone see any big issues with my replacement technique? I don't know any other method that would work.Bish
If it were my floor, I'd agree with David and say refinish the existing floor. But then again, I hate the microbevel of prefinished flooring.