According To The Directions…
Posted on | June 16, 2010 | No Comments
Ah yes — the manufacturer’s recommended manner of installation.
According to the directions on each huge carton of bamboo flooring, we were meant to install it over a padded foam underlay via a nail-through-the-tongue-end method. And so my husband, who renovates houses for a living and who has never installed a timber floor without both gluing it and nailing it, did exactly what the manufacturers instructed. And they were wrong, wrong, wrong on so many levels!
We moved into our new house almost exactly one year ago and those pale blond floors were a source of visual joy — joy that began to be seriously squashed when the ‘issue’ first appeared prior to Christmas. At first it was simply a little squeak sound in a few places in the living-room. Then it progressed to a more serious set of crackles in the bedroom. And by the time we decided that enough was enough, my husband said that if I got up in the middle of the night to take an aspirin or get a glass of water, he knew exactly where I was in the house by the series of sounds. Not acceptable!
Research queen that I am, I did a web search and discovered that it was a ‘known issue’ with bamboo flooring and there were anguished letters from owners of houses much larger than ours who were moaning on public forums about the snap-crackle-pop effect of simply walking from room to room. Our house is tiny and what we have just gone through was inconvenient, but most of these news-group writers were discussing huge houses that had been constructed in an eco-conscious manner with sustainable materials — the same reasoning we used in our choice of materials. I can only imagine the stress of having to uninstall and reinstall the acres of flooring in those houses!
Thus we have now gone through construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction — all in the space of a mere 13 months time period. Aaarrrggghhh!
A week ago, Mark began pulling up every single piece of timber flooring throughout the house. 
But prior to that little endeavor, we had to move every stick of furniture out and into the addition that was completed in February, a wing on the back of the house that we had (thank heavens!) tiled instead of using the bamboo flooring again. And there we have camped out for well over a week while he removed the floor and reinstalled it with toxic-smelling, gag-inducing adhesive.
The clean and tidy addition went from this shot below 
to the next two. Aarrgghh!
Expeditions were made on occasion to the kitchen or the bathroom, but the rest of the time was spent eating, sleeping, doing office work, and watching television in a 30 square metre space. At least we both had a sense of humour about it all.
Now we can reassemble the house tomorrow and enjoy strolling boldly across the blond floors. But I can almost guarantee that, for awhile at least, we will hold our breath each and every time we hear a creak, groan, or noise anywhere within these walls.
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Deborah Harmes, Ph.D.
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