Video 3 Basement Flooring Options v3

Does your basement look something like this? If you're finishing your basement

now or plan to, then you're going to have to make decisions about the kind of

finished flooring that you're going to put down. Now technically you can put

down just about any finished flooring you want in your basement, but I'm here

to warn you that some of those choices cause problems. So this video is all

about my favorite and recommended three finished flooring options for basements. They offer unique advantages and I want to explain them now so you can make a

more informed choice. The first option I want to talk about is carpeting. It's

actually not my personal favorite. I don't like carpeting anywhere in the

house, upstairs or in the basement, but it is very popular with people and so

that's why I want to mention it up front. It's popular because you get a soft

surface and it's a little bit warmer too. So all of those things are great, but you

need to understand something and it has to do with a dynamic that often sets in

that's difficult to understand ahead of time but really damaging when it does

finally set in. So what you need before carpet goes down is some sort of a

basement subfloor. Now here you've got some basement subfloor panels. This is

the Dricorp brand. They're widely available, excellent quality, they work really well, but this is what you need to properly put down any sort of a

carpet in your basement and the reason is because of something that's hard to

pick out ahead of time. Now this is a cross-section. Here you can see the

carpet and then here is some under pad and this is a cross-section of a

concrete floor. This is the way a lot of carpet goes down on basements and it

causes problems. So imagine for a moment at summertime and there's warm, humid air

in the basement. It is going to make its way through the carpet and the under pad

Neither of those materials have what it takes to stop the movement of air through them. So if the air is in the basement, it's going to get

through carpet and under pad and it's going to come in contact with the cool

concrete floor. Now when that happens, there's a very good chance that the air

will cool down to the point where condensation occurs within the carpet

under pad. It won't be enough that you can tell that it's wet. It's not going to

be squishy underfoot or anything like that, but it doesn't take very much

moisture to trigger mold and mildew growth and that's often what happens

In fact, this dynamic is the leading cause of musty basement smells, but this is also

where a basement subfloor comes in handy. So here you can see the same sort of

carpet and underlay on top of concrete arrangement, except now we have a

subfloor panel in place and this makes all the difference because when that

warm moist air tries to percolate down, it's going to get through the carpet

it's going to get through the underlay, eventually it's even going to get

through this this 3 quarter inch thick OSB here, which is what the subfloor

panels are made out of, but the moisture, the moist air will not get

past this layer here. This is plastic, which acts as a kind of a vapor barrier

to stop this dynamic from happening, but it also raises the subfloor off the

concrete, so there's a little bit of an airspace there. The airspace provides some insulation. I would say more importantly, it also provides a small

area for tiny amounts of leaked liquid water to go, if that's ever an issue

Bottom line is that an installation like this is going to prevent that

condensation dynamic that is so common with carpets and underlay applied directly to concrete. Now this flooring is Luxury Vinyl Plank and I like it a

lot. It is, I think, one of the very best for basements. First of all, as you can

see, it delivers an authentic wood grain look. It looks terrific. Because Luxury

Vinyl Plank and its cousin, Luxury Vinyl Tile, are inorganic, then they're not

going to warp or crack or promote the growth of any kind of nasty stuff that

you don't want growing in your house. So, very good for that. It's also extremely

tough. It's much, much tougher than a hardwood floor. You're actually, you'd

have to have a difficult time damaging this stuff. So it stands up really, really

well. There's another advantage and it's harder to understand, but it's really

quite huge, and that's that this stuff is flexible, which is a great advantage for

basements. So this is a piece of Luxury Vinyl Plank and look at how easily that

bends. What that means is that, unlike other similar flooring, like laminate, for

instance, this can follow small undulations in the floor. So, whereas laminate flooring is good and tough for basements and it's kind of inorganic as

well, but it's rigid. The pieces are rigid, so the floor needs to be very flat. And

it can be quite a pain to flatten a basement floor, concrete basement floor

that they're often not poured with extreme precision. So the laminate option

can be a real pain, but the Luxury Vinyl Plank, it's going to work really well for

you. It's just going to follow any undulations that are there. It doesn't

have to be fastened down either. This is a floating floor that clicks together. So

that's another advantage over real hardwood. It's tougher, it's better suited to basement conditions. It also doesn't need to be fastened, and it

floats and conforms to any unusual shapes in the floor. So, great stuff, but

it does need to be installed over a subfloor again, for similar reasons to

what we saw with the carpeting, and also increasing comfort. So here's some

basement subfloor panels going down. This is the kind that has the dimpled bottom

layer, so there's an actual air space there, and the plastic stops the

downward movement of warm, moist air. So it blocks that condensation, as well as

providing more comfort, and even a little bit of drainage capabilities, should you

get a little bit of moisture underneath there. Now here you can see the same

subfloor panels. You can see that they're raised a bit off the ground. Now

sometimes, if the basement floor, the concrete is not flat enough, it will

cause these tiles to wobble. So the Dricore system comes with shims that

work really well, and you can put in one, or two, or three, or more in a low spot to

bring it up, and stop it from wobbling, and just make it more solid. A third type

of flooring that's suitable for basements is called engineered flooring, and that's what you see here. If you have your heart set on having real wood, and

not a wood look-alike downstairs, then engineered flooring is really the way to

go. It's far superior to solid wood flooring for a couple of reasons, and one

of them is stability. So if you look here, you'll see this layer on top. That's a

tropical hardwood called merbau, and it's the finished surface. This is a

pre-finished, engineered flooring, ready to go. So there's no on-site finishing or

anything, so that's great. But that's not too unusual. What you really need to

know about here is that the merbau, a little more than an eighth of an inch thick or so, is factory bonded to this plywood substrate. Now the idea with the

plywood is twofold. First of all, it's going to add a lot of stability. A plank

of this stuff is going to change shape much less with changes in moisture than

a piece of solid merbau. Plywood, because it's made out of layers with the grain

direction going in alternate directions, then it tends to be self-binding in a

sense that one layer restricts the movement of the other. So it's pretty

stable with changes in humidity. Also, it's fairly strong because of the

multiple layers, so you get to the next feature, the next feature of an

engineered floor that you need to pay attention to for basement use, and that's

a click style. Not all engineered flooring is clickable. So it goes

together, holds together by clicking in place with its neighbor, and is

floating. Not all engineered floorings are like that, so I want to alert you to

the difference before you go shopping. What you see here is a piece of merbau

engineered flooring, but it has to be dealt with just like regular solid

hardwood flooring, in that it doesn't click together. There are tongue and groove

edges, of course, but those edges need to be nailed down when it's not a click

configuration, and that's a problem in a basement, because while the concrete's

there, it doesn't accept nails. You can't drive nails and expect them to hold

if they're just going into subfloor panel material, so it's kind of a

surprisingly troublesome complication when you have to fasten a plank style floor like this to a basement floor, and that's why we like to go with the

floating click option, which is far superior, and here you can see that the

same merbau that I showed you previously is now clicked together, so you can see

how it interlocks, how it holds together, and so it's stable and it's also

floating. Two huge advantages for a basement. So as you can see, there aren't

a whole, a full range of options for finished flooring that make sense in the

basements, but we have touched on three here that that will do a good job for

you and look great, and when installed over a proper subfloor will last a long

time and won't trigger any sort of mold or mildew growth under normal conditions