Flooring is by no means beneath me, but I haven’t really done anything below a shoe molding. So question for the tile high club: What would you do in the pictured situation? These are floor sections that have always felt a bit “squishy”. Today they finally popped up into the tent formation you see here.
Wait for it to settle and then add glue to keep it down? Cut it to fit?
Additional context:
I did not do this install myself, so the history is a bit of a mystery. This is installed in a full bathroom and is made of what feels like a smoothed slate material. I believe it is a composite tile.
More photos for context:
So you know how bricks aren’t lined up in neat rows vertically? You need to stagger the courses of flooring in a similar way. Also you need to leave an expansion gap around the perimeter of the entire room for when the wood expands. Also did you let this flooring heat up in the room for a full day before installation? Not letting it acclimate can lead to this but the most likely culprit is just not lining up the joints like that.
I did not do this installation, so any history of the install would be speculation.
Well you can see the courses are wrong just from the picture so you should fix that first. It’s fairly easy to do since one is already popped up.
To figure out if there is an expansion gap just take off one of you base boards. There should be a centimeter or so gap near the walls. If there isn’t that’s going to suck a lot more than just redoing the pattern since you might have to start trimming an edge or two of the entire room.
Unfortunately there is no baseboard to speak of in the bathroom. Here’s a better picture of the floor meeting the wall. This extends all around the room.
Yeah, it looks like whoever installed it didn’t know what they were doing. You should be able to fix it fairly easy but it’s going to have to be the whole floor since there doesn’t appear to be a gap. You’d have to pull the whole floor up and reinstall them all making sure to leave a 0.5-1 cm gap around the perimeter and properly aligned like in the picture I posted above. The person probably didn’t leave a gap because it will look like shit and stuff will get in it since there is no baseboard. A better option might be to pull it and put vinyl planks in there instead of laminate. Vinyl planks have less thermal expansion than wood or laminate so you wouldn’t have to leave an unsightly gap or install baseboards.
Is this not tile?
Looks like bamboo or laminate click flooring to me.
Edit: Looking at those new pics he posted though looks like you might be right. The backs look like tiles so maybe it’s that tile that is printed to look like wood/bamboo. If that’s the case then he can pull the tiles and lay down some tile cement and put the tiles back after cutting the door one a little so it fits.
It’s really weird to not have grout if it’s tiles as that would make the floor not waterproof.
This is 100% porcelain tile. I worked in a tile factory- there’s no mistaking it.
It’s a hard, inflexible material. I have heard it referred to as composite.
Not sure if it changes anything, but they added what looks like a dark grout or potentially caulking between the wall/floor seam.
You know, that does look like they grouted it. You might be able to get away with just removing that grout/caulk and then just redoing the pattern. If the floor can’t move it will buckle but the pattern will make that problem even worse. So with both problems it was kind of just a given. If they added that grout because the whole floor moves then you can get non slip underlay to prevent that movement.
I actually disagree with this, only because the flooring is tile, not LVP. Tile can be installed in this pattern, and it is actually recommended to have no more than a 33% overlap with rectangular tiles to prevent slippage in installation.
Yeah. I agree with you. I was working off only a couple pictures which made it look like lvp or laminate. He added extra ones later that showed they were tile.