Contact Floor Coverings International Of Houston
Transcript
Kim Gustafson:
These different layers are run in different directions.
Hi, I’m Kim with Floor Coverings International. I want to welcome you to this house here in Houston where we’re putting in an engineered hardwood floor. You can see my team installing the wood right now. We’re gluing it down to the concrete foundation here.
This hallway is where we start our projects. We want to get the wood centered up in this space because the first view to give the visitors to your home see is the hallway. So what we do is we drop a line to make sure it’s nice and straight, and then we calculate how many boards will fit in your entryway. We try to center those up. It might not be a full plank on each side, but in this case, we got really lucky with the sides. You can see that we have almost a full plank on both the right and the left, and it’s beautifully straight.
Over here, you can see we have one of the more tricky aspects of the job. We’ve got this beautiful stone wall and where a lot of other companies would install a trim on that wall because it’s an imperfect wall, it’s not straight, any trim that we try to put on it is not going to look good. It’s not going to look finished. So what my team did was they undercut the stone and then they carved the wood to be the perfect fit underneath the stone.
In order to install wood on your concrete floor, we want it to be an engineered hardwood because these different layers are run in different directions. So the top layer goes is layer you see with the grain, but the second layer down goes the opposite direction. And that’s important to help it resist from expanding and contracting a lot throughout the time that it’s on your floor. We don’t want to see large gaps, and that’s what would happen if you glued a solid hardwood directly to your concrete.
As you can see here, we have piles of wood in multiple places throughout the house. The wood that’s sitting here, it’s acclimating to the temperature and the humidity of the house. This is a really important step because wood expands and contracts at different rates than your house. So we need to get it to your temperature and humidity before we start installing so that it won’t fail.
So now we’re in part of the space that we haven’t yet gotten to. So you can see the subfloor here. You can probably tell we took out tile. And then if you notice the principally gray area, this is leveling compound that we put in to smooth out the subfloor. The leveling compound that we use when we’re putting in a wood floor is an outdoor rated leveling compound. Because this is a concrete foundation in Houston and concrete being porous, it’s going to wick up moisture when we have seasons of heavy rains. We don’t want the leveling compound that’s on the floor to powderize. So it’s really important and it’s one of the things that makes us different from a lot of other flooring companies in the city.
I don’t know if you can see the swirl marks on the leveling compound. It doesn’t go in that way. We actually buff it to get it smooth. So we bring our flooring sander in here and we buff it to get it smooth so that you’ve got a really nice smooth surface on which to install the wood floor. So when we’re installing the wood floor, we use glue that has a hundred percent moisture barrier properties. We want that glue to prevent the wood from getting damaged from moisture from your slab. We use the right trowel for it, and we put it in on all of our wood jobs.
One of my favorite things about wood is its uniqueness.
Just like people, each tree, each board that we would put in your house of engineered hardwood would be unique. You can take a look at these two boards. This is white oak. It’s European white oak, and it’s stained with the same stain. But you can see that they took the stain very differently, and that’s because the trees that they came from each drank different minerals when they were growing to be those trees. So the result that you get is beautiful variation in your floor that you can’t replicate even with the very best of fake wood products, be it tile, laminate, or LVP.
