LESLIE: Now we’re going to take a call about our number one topic of question asked here at The Money Pit – flooring, with John in Delaware. Tell us about your problem.
JOHN: Yes, I had a new vinyl floor put in.
TOM: Alright.
JOHN: And they failed to roll it with a roller.
TOM: Mm-hmm.
JOHN: Now the vinyl doesn’t seem to be sticking to the luan flooring that they put down under it.
TOM: Was there an adhesive put underneath the vinyl sheet floor or was it just laid on top? Because some of them are floating.
JOHN: No, it was – the vinyl or the glue was put down …
TOM: Mm-hmm.
JOHN: … and then the flooring was put down.
TOM: So you’ve got some delamination now. You know, how bad is it? Is it real visible?
JOHN: No, it isn’t visible at all. It just cracks in certain spots when …
TOM: Yeah.
JOHN: … when you walk on it.
TOM: You mean like – when you say cracks, like a floor creak or the physical material is cracking?
JOHN: It sounds like it’s not sticking to the glue that it’s …
TOM: Oh, does it have like a popping sound?
JOHN: Yeah.
TOM: OK, that’s – what’s happening there is it’s probably not that the floor is not stuck to the luan. It’s that the luan is not stuck to the subfloor underneath. Sometimes you get some space in between the luan and the subfloor. That’s a fairly common type of a floor noise. And you get this very crisp popping sound. Instead of a creak or a squeak you get sort of a clicking sound.
JOHN: Right.
TOM: And it’s not – it’s basically going to annoy you but it’s not disruptive or destructive in any way.
JOHN: I know. It’s just annoying.
TOM: Well, listen. I can tell you how to fix it, but it’s a high-risk repair and here’s why. I have fixed these before and the way I’ve done it is with a hole saw …
JOHN: Yeah.
TOM: … where I’ve gone underneath. And I’ve found the area where I thought the gap was and I very carefully used a hole saw to cut out the subfloor but not the luan.
JOHN: Luan, yeah.
TOM: I say it’s a high-risk repair because if you’ve ever used a hole saw you know there’s a drill bit that comes up through the middle of it.
JOHN: Right.
TOM: And if that drill bit is a little bit too long, it’s going to poke right up …
JOHN: Right, yeah.
TOM: … through your vinyl floor and now you’re going to be calling us about how do I fix in a hole in a vinyl floor, thank you very much.
JOHN: I follow you exactly.
TOM: But if you can get just that little plug of subfloor out of there, you can take liquid nails or another construction adhesive and squeeze it in there and then weight the floor from the top, you know, with a heavy chair or even by, say, inserting a 2×4 from the floor to the ceiling as a temporary hold-down.
JOHN: Yeah.
TOM: That would tighten that up and that will silence that. But you know, listen. I wouldn’t do it myself unless it really, really bothered me because, like I say, it’s easy to screw this one up, John.
JOHN: Well, to tell you, when you have radical changes in temperature, sometimes it does it and sometimes it doesn’t.
TOM: It’s not going to hurt the floor. Just going to be bugging you. So I’d learn to live with it. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
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