The Problem With A Floating Floor

There are several challenges with floating flooring. It takes a whole lot of work, time and energy to get it looking like a real wood floor. The surface it lies on has to be perfectly flat, to start.  No problem, right? But you check, and …uh-oh. You’ve just discovered your flat sub floor isn’t flat after all. This means stirring up and applying a filler which with more work dries level to support the pieces. That’s only if you’ve done it absolutely right. It’s not wet enough to find its own perfect level. Why would it? After all, you’v already chosen to go the cheaper route rather than use real wood planks, haven’t you? That already says a cheap imitation is good enough… for you.

Somewhere, some time, some wise person admonished the world to be careful what you asked for.

The “floating wood floor” sales staff tell you how to get your pieces almost to the edge of the floor but not too tight. They’ll tell you that your floor will  expand and contract with temperature and humidity, and you need to give it room. They never tell you that with your thermostat set at a fairly constant comfortable temperature, it’s not that big an issue. Listening to the salesmen will create one however. Maybe one strip in 20 strips of pieces cut to go across the full width of your floor wind up being the correct length, not too short so they slide all over the place, not so long something buckles. Whatever space you’re told to put between the end of the planks and the vertical walls on each end, use only half that much. They really don’t shrink and stretch like the sales people say. If you follow their directions you’ll be back in six months willing to lay down more big bucks for a better floor. Why not sell you two floors when you only need one? Not to mention the second one will often be the expensive one you tried to avoid getting in the first place.

How does that happen? Well, if you put 1/8” space between one end of your planks row and the wall on that end, and the same thing on the other, suddenly you have a quarter inch of moving shifting space. Murphy’s law demands that it always manages, with people walking on the floor, to accumulate somewhere in the middle of the floor, where it’s most conspicuous. Further, every speck of dirt, dust, animal fur, or food will collect in the spot, be impossible to remove because of how the planks interlock, and manage to somehow drive the gap wider as the ends worm their way apart even more than you would believe the rules of physics allow.

It can be so tempting to peel back the original linoleum, or carpeting, thanks to how ugly they look after all those years and how badly they turn you off of ever using such again, and vow to get something different. Beautiful. Just like they look in the store displays. Who knew fake woodgrain came in so many wonderful patterns and colors? If you really are in love with wooden floors, for Pete’s sake GET SOME DANG REAL WOODEN FLOORS! Lay it out, tamp it down, NAIL IT to the cotton-picking subfloor! Throw in some bottles of glue for good measure, but whatever you do, don’t let the thing float!!!

Your floating floor will move. Separate. Creep and crawl. As the fill makes it more uneven, corners stick up, corners dive down, crawl over other pieces’s edges, teetering till one more foot print splinters the corner and two of the three new pieces spread out to make more mischief. It’s become a competition to find out just which tiny bit sticking up now can be the first to poke through your unlucky bare foot, just because you have to, really really have to get up in the dark of night and go to the bathroom or get a snack or drink from the refrigerator, or rock the baby back to sleep …if you’re lucky and baby isn’t teething or something. In the daytime, when presumably you are alert, possibly well shod, and can avoid the troublesome spots in the floor, then you don’t have to worry so much. But night… oh my! When baby starts crawling… Yikes! Danger Will Robinson!

For a while they used a kind of particle board when all-wood got horribly expensive. After that they inserted a strip of metal through the middle to help keep things flat. Except it didn’t. The sales people somehow never managed to inform you of that fact, instead claiming it was so-o-o-o much better than the last incarnation of a floating floor. Any small heavy thing, like a portable dishwasher’s wheels for example, or a rolling chair inhabited by a human going across the floor, wreaked havoc on the surface. Corners chipped off. Metal strips curled up, sharp now, strewn in curls over the floor and into the floor and… into your bare feet. If you were lucky, perhaps they only tripped you as you allowed your feet to shuffle a bit. Of course, “lucky” depends on just how you landed.

At first, as things start breaking down, duct tape is very handy, helping coat the edges, slow movement, save skin on feet. But now you only think it’s safe to walk on because the duct tape camouflages the sharp edges. You go back to rolling wheels over the floor.  But the tape wears away even faster than the top of the planks, so now you have something extremely ugly, and sticky to boot. You pick up the tough loose pieces which were actually filling in sharp missing corners, making the next level of destruction even faster and deeper. As a bonus it’s become even more impossible to keep clean.

Months pass. Possibly you let years pass. Holes fill in and spread wider. More sharp curls peel off. One day it finally happens. You look at the floor in its actual state, and realize, “Hey, that ugly old fashioned linoleum floor was never this ugly or dangerous. Let’s go shopping for some, see what’s the latest thing now. Hey, maybe they even have some of that in a nice pretty woodgrain design!"

Congratulations! You’ve realized that the truly worst thing about this floating floor you’ve surrounded yourself with is its biggest flaw: it floats!