A couple weeks ago I sent you an email asking for your vote. Apparently that was just the nomination process. Now I’m currently running for top flooring company in Panama City. If you don’t mind, please follow this link AGAIN and vote for me. The main category is “Company”, and you have to scroll down halfway through everything to get to “Company” and then the subcategory “Flooring”, and then of course, Carpet One J: http://www.newsherald.com/sections/bestofbay/

It’s the last time I promise!

Thanks,

John Shepard, Carpet One Floor & Home

Before I knew Ken, I guess he bought and installed some travertine on his own which is no surprise because he seems like a real do-it-yourselfer.  Prior military myself, like Ken, I can say confidently that most of us are the same way, and we like to have straight answers as well, which is why we research the devil out of something.

In Ken’s case, he definitely sought advice, but the problem came when his advice was incorrect.  My question is how can you know the advice is correct if you have no basis from which to judge it?  In other words, if you are a complete novice, how do you know the person giving you the advice is any more knowledgeable?

Ken’s story was just fine, and it sounded like he did a great job.  He said he lucked out by finding a guy who knew everything about tile installation at Home Depot or Lowes.  He even told him how to decrease sag in the thin set by adding Styrofoam insulation beads to the mix.  WHAT???????  What a great way to void your warranty and eliminate the longevity of the installation!  My gosh, you may as well install it using Elmer’s Glue or construction adhesive.

Here’s the scoop.  You do not use thin set to install travertine (a natural stone) in the first place.  Thin set is just that—it is thin set!  When you set stone, you have to use a medium bed mortar, or stone setting materials.  Come on people.  You big box guys give me a ton of work; unfortunately, it is always cleaning up your messes and bad advice.  Thin set mortar is used under ceramic and porcelain where thinner layers of mortar are required because the weight of the tile is nominal compared to stone.  When setting stone, you have to have a mortar that does not sag; otherwise, you end up having major difficulties as you move along keeping them level.

Adding Styrofoam beads to a mortar, against the manufacturer’s directions, does nothing but interfere with the chemical bonds created by the Portland cement once you add the water and the curing process begins.  You can throw candy in some whip cream, but it doesn’t make a milkshake.  In this case, if Ken had followed the directions on the bag, he would have realized he was using the improper setting materials in the first place because thin set states very clearly that it can only be used to set ceramic tile.

You can see from this story that bad advice really does come cheap.  Cut a corner, save a dime, reap a lifetime of unhappiness, sometimes….

Have you ever seen an improperly assembled, custom shower?  When you do, you will never forget it because behind the wall is a black, nasty mess.  If you are on an upper floor, the first people to realize you have a leak will be the people below you, but if you live on the ground floor, you stand a good chance of never knowing it unless the mold starts infiltrating the inside of the shower or you decide to replace the existing tile.

Schluter Systems Installation

You may wonder how anyone can install a leaky shower.  The correct answer is that no one installs a leaky shower if they do it right!  Properly installed, a moisture membrane prevents all water from penetrating the surrounding walls and touching the studs.  The problem some tile mechanics have is that they never learned to properly prepare a shower for tile.  Many installers continue to believe that the materials used in the shower are actually waterproof when in fact they are not.

Most installers believe that concrete board and backer boards are waterproof.  This is an extreme misconception.  The boards are designed to stay together in water and not fall apart, but they absolutely do not keep water from passing through it.  There are a few water proof boards on the market.  Georgia Pacific makes one call Denshield, and it actually has a moisture membrane on the front of the board.  When you use the other boards though, you have to install a moisture barrier between the board and the studs.  Many installers are ignorant of this fact.

Another tool for you to think about is a shower system.  Shower systems are sold and marketed by certain companies to integrate with your tile in any set of circumstances.  The two main ones that I know of are Schluter Systems and Wedi.  Since our work involves Schluter extensively , I will spend my time talking about it.

The Schluter System comes with a preformed tray to place in the bottom of the shower.  Since one of the hardest tasks for an installer is providing the proper gradient to the drain in order to prevent puddling, Schluter Systems rectified this with a pre-sloped pan.  You would not believe the amount of people who overlook the necessity of a pre-slope underneath the normal shower pan.  In fact, since it is not part of the building code in some parts of the country, it is not done at all most of the time.  The pre-slope that I am talking about actually includes filling the place where the shower is located with a sloped bed of rocks or cement prior to the plumber’s installation of the rubber pan.  The rubber pan actually sits on top of the bed, and once the pre-slope is installed, water actually will run down the face of the pan into the drain.  Done without the pre-slope, the water will sit in the pan creating a moist donut shaped area around the drain where fungus and mold will love to hang out.

Once you install the tray, the Schluter kit comes with a special integrated bonding flange for the drain as well as a slip in drain that is square for ease of integration into the tile floor.  Once the tray and flange are in place, the installer simply applies the Kerdi on the walls, floor, and curb to produce an orange looking shower before tile goes in.  The key to the entire system is Kerdi which is an orange polyethylene film bonded to a layer of fleece on the front and back.  The fleece provides a bonding surface to stick to the wall and to stick to the tile.  The polyethylene layer provides 100% water tightness, even in an overlap situation.  Schluter tested their system with a four to six inch overlap and documented no seepage; therefore, they do not require you to use entire sheets of Kerdi at one time.  You simply seal it by overlapping the sheets a minimum of four inches.

Once the Kerdi is installed, the shower is ready for tile.  Place the tile in position, install the drain, grout the tile, and you are ready to take a shower.  The Schluter System really is the best on the market.  For more information on Schluter Systems, visit www.CarpetOnePanamaCity.com or www.schlutersystems.com.  Sign up for more information and to be on our mailing list.

You can buy these products at Carpet One Floor & Home which is an authorized reseller of Schluter Systems.

I realized after I got off the phone with the gentleman how little emphasis gets placed upon testing for moisture by local contractors.  Even more shocking is the fact that it seems like only the largest companies apparently concern themselves with it.  Examining a national chain store, I see that they have the proper view that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

In my business I work with numerous contractors and talk with them day in and day out, and I can tell you that the level of professionalism in areas such as moisture remediation is extremely poor.  In fact, most general contractors do not even know what it is, and when you mention the need for it, they complain that you are too hard to work with.  It seems that their experience in working with other companies, who do not care, gave them a cavalier attitude that moisture and other such issues are menial.  They have yet to experience a catastrophic failure because of it.  The odd part of the matter is that when they do experience a catastrophic failure, their business will not live to tell about it.

Moisture issues on the whole are among the most insidious around, but more profound is the fact that they are preventable with relatively simple testing procedures.  Further, no construction project is immune because even the smallest house can be affected by an unseen moisture problem.  Moreover, the more important questions appear to be where it comes from and what does it affect.  Both answers are rather lengthy and less than finite.

Moisture testing gathers information quantitatively about subterranean moisture (coming from underneath the substrate).  While numerous testing methods exist, the most prevalent at this time is the Calcium Chloride test performed on top of concrete substrates.  As you might have guessed, concrete subfloors are the most common type in our region, Panama City, FL; therefore, I will tell you a little bit more about them.

Where does it come from?  Moisture comes from beneath the concrete itself as it migrates up from the ground into the structure.  Since no structure is perfectly air tight, moisture migration is a constant process, is normal, and is to be expected as long as it is controlled and not extreme.  The most typical kind of control used in concrete subfloors is the use of a plastic membrane underneath the concrete slab.  Slightly less well known is the tendency of concrete workers to poke holes in the plastic barrier to decrease drying time.  Shocking, perhaps, but yes, it happens!

When moisture reaches the surface of the concrete in acceptable quantities, it off gasses into the air and maintains normal humidity in a house.  In greater quantities, the moisture will cause problems such as dissolution of adhesives use to hold a floor down like hardwood or vinyl, rotting of floor materials such as carpet or hardwood, growth of mold in cushion or hardwood, and even worse things than these.  Found early enough, disastrous problems can be diverted, so why would you not want to know ahead of time what could happen to your hardwood, laminate, carpet, or vinyl because of unseen moisture?

The answer most general contractors seem most willing to give is that they have done it this way for years and never had a problem.  One thing I can say for certain is they do have problems, but the problems usually come after the warranty is expired.  I know this because I inspect floors and see these problems regularly, and I experience push back from general contractors all the time as they persist in trying to maintain the status quo.  As a whole, they prefer to shove their heads in the sand instead of dealing with potential problems head on.

As for me and my store, we will continue to press forward with completing our installations in accordance with industry standards.  Our integrity is too valuable to sacrifice for a few measly dollars. 

For more information on this and other topics, go to our website: www.CarpetOnePanamaCity.com.  In the meantime, insist your flooring company follows the legal boundaries set forth by the industry.  Do your due diligence in checking out their background, and you may be surprised by what you find.  I recently found that a certain company in our area who claimed to be the oldest has actually gone out of business twice, and reopened.  A simple visit to http://sunbiz.org gave me that information.  It never ceases to amaze me at what some people will do to make a dollar…

It pays to look first at how laminate is made.  While laminate may look the same on the surface, it is made primarily in one of two ways.  Direct Pressure is the most prevalent method in the industry and is used to mass produce millions of feet of laminate every year.  High pressure laminate is a much more refined process taking longer to create and costing more money to achieve.  While the two processes are entirely different, the construction and layers are parallel.

All laminate has a backing that is the same thickness as the finish layer, and likewise, every laminate has a core board that gives the laminate board its structural stability as well as the ability to having a locking system by which to connect the boards together.  The core board consists of wood pulp mixed with resin and compressed.  Both the finish layer and the backing layers adhere to the core board in their respective positions

What is in the finish layer?  The finish layer consists of a photograph of an actual piece of wood, or stone, with various layers of melamine, aluminum oxide, or any other proprietary blends which give laminate its legendary scratch proof reputation.  The process through which the three parts bond together brings us back to the two processes discussed earlier: direct pressure versus high pressure.

Most manufacturers use direct pressure for a reason: It is highly cost effective to create thousands of feet of product in a cycle very quickly.  The energy used to create direct pressure laminate is substantially less as it is done at lower temperatures than the high pressure processes, and the materials used to make the direct pressure laminate are also less in that the high pressure layers are two to three times thicker than its direct pressure counter part.

In the direct pressure process, the layers of laminate come together in a continuous process through a set of rolling presses that apply the backing and photo finish layers simultaneously.  In the high pressure process, workers stack each layer of backing and photo finish layers by hand much like a quilt or blanket.  You can see these layers in the photograph above.  Once the workers finish the blankets, they stack them together, sandwiched between metal plates, in a hydraulic press.  They roll the presses into an oven, and the laminate bakes at high temperatures under constant pressure until completion.  Once completed, the layers of laminate are adhered to the core boards and cut into individual planks.  The result of the high pressure process is a highly durable product.  In fact, although you would not know it, countertops are the most widely used recipient of high pressure laminate, and currently, Wilsonart is the only manufacturer to product high pressure laminate for floors.

High pressure laminate is rare in the flooring industry, and it becomes more rare everyday.  In fact, Wilsonart announced recently that they intend to exit the flooring business entirely by December 2010 due to market conditions.  As you can imagine, high pressure laminate costs substantially more to produce: more materials, more energy, and more labor.  While Wilsonart pioneered the use of laminate in commercial applications, they could not effectively parlay the success into the residential sector primarily because of the cost, and even though a home owner stands a higher chance of having a floor that will last a lifetime with a high pressure design, it is a difficult concept to grasp when cheaper home center laminate is available.  Direct pressure laminate rolls out of facilities at a rate of thousands of feet at a time, and as the supply increases the price naturally comes down.

All of this leads us back to the original question: Does the thickness of a core board determine the value or durability of the laminate?  What do you think?  The answer still is not that simple, and sometimes the answers are definitely mutually exclusive.  The cheapest laminates certainly come thinner than normal.  I have never seen a 6mm laminate of high quality.  Alternatively though, I see many direct pressure laminates with 12mm core boards, and when compared to an 8mm High Pressure laminate, the 12mm laminate is certainly not high quality.  Why make something so thick if it does not affect the quality?  Because customers sometimes like to see thicker….Sometimes thicker just looks better I suppose.  I am also sure that it may make a difference in sound under foot; however, I have never noticed a difference.  As always, buyers must beware of every marketing technique by reading the information, looking at the warranties, and asking plenty of questions.

As always, for more information, check out our website for more information about anything involving floors.