“Help with new Flooring – During a particularly brutal heat wave last summer, the old laminate buckled in numerous places.”

Photo by PoPville flickr user Rukasu1

“Dear PoPville,

We’re having some trouble selecting what kind of floor to install in our condo and I was hoping the PoPville community could offer some advice. We need new flooring in the majority of our ground level condo. During a particularly brutal heat wave last summer, the old laminate buckled in numerous places. It was so bad that I was convinced there must be water under the floor, but once we pulled up a piece of the flooring we found the concrete sub-floor bone dry. This past month we had a shipment of bamboo flooring delivered and stacked to acclimate only for the installers to find out the material had bowed already and was impossible to install. Both of these failures happened during a heat wave, but we have central air conditioning which was on constantly so the heat and humidity couldn’t have been too bad.

Have other people in the area had similar experiences with laminate or engineered wood flooring? Are we just experiencing the consequences of poor quality materials or could something else be going on? Should we resign ourselves to installing tile so we can stop thinking about floors?”