Hardwood Floors August/September 2019

AT THE SITE

Engineered Flooring Installation on Concrete PART 1 Best Practices for Glue-Down

Some engineered wood flooring products are designed for a glue-down application when installing flooring over a concrete slab. Other products are better suited for a nail-down installation where they are secured to a wood subfloor with nails or staples. For do-it-yourselfers, the preferred method is the floating floor installation, which uses no glue or nails. Instead, the engineered wood planks are joined together with interlocking joints, creating a single, continuous layer that floats over the subfloor. This article, however, focuses only on the glue-down application. Nail-down and floating floor installations will be covered in parts 2 and 3 of this article series.

Don’t let the term "engineered" give you the wrong impression. Engineered wood is real wood. Although it’s not made of solid hardwood, it doesn’t mean that engineered flooring does not provide all of the warmth, longevity, and elegance of a hardwood floor. Engineered wood flooring is recommended for quite a few locations where you would not expect to see wood flooring due to the strength of its construction, minimizing natural movement with temperature and humidity changes. Built with various types of core material, engineered flooring provides a wide range of aesthetic benefits as well with the ability to choose from a wide variety of colors, textures, and wood species for the surface layer. Once installed, engineered wood planks look the same as solid wood planks.

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