Bad luck with flooring!

I don't know what it is with us and floors, but I feel like we have the worst luck when it comes to flooring. (This post is to prevent other people from making the same mistake as we did)

I have several projects that I started but my main focus is on regluing the floor in our basement. Our basement carpet was ruined last year after Hurricane Irene hit the East coast (it was around the end of August). We expected terrible weather and power outages, so we have a generator for those emergencies. When the electricity went off it took us too long to hook up the generator and the pumps were off for too long, so our basement flooded. We had to rip out all the carpeting and since we didn't want to deal with something like this again we decided to put a water proof floor in the basement.
I did a lot of research and first wanted to put concrete floors in but then we went with something that I could do myself and that wouldn't be so cold: Allure Traffic Master Vinyl (Maple) plank flooring from Home Depot.

Allure Traffic Master Vinyl Plank Floor

I first leveled some of the imperfections with self leveling concrete before starting with the plank flooring. It was so easy to install. I did it myself and for the first 2 month it looked awesome. I did follow the exact instructions on the manual by the way which I'm not going to bore you with.

I have to warn you: THE PHOTOS ARE TERRIBLE! But I can't retake them because the basement looks horrible right now :(

Here is a picture of the nightmare! You can see the fixed concrete area by the bar.

You might wonder why I went with light colored flooring throughout our house instead of the "in-style" dark wood flooring. Well, the reason is dirt, dust and cat hair! If you have dark wood furniture then you know how often you have to dust them! You can see everything. On my light flooring you can't see the dirt as much. Plain and simple.

Here is what our basement looked like after I finished the floors, new molding and repainting of the walls.  I even painted my yucky old brown desk a fresh coat of white and transformed it into a craft area. Ahhhhh, I was so happy! And it looked so awesome.

Oh yes, my hubby has his baseball cards on the wall.

Another man cave photo and I hate the furniture down here!

 

Now the furniture/sofa in the basement is NOT awesome. I don't like it but we agreed on not buying new sofas and rugs until the sad day of our old cats not being alive anymore. 

This is where this story should end and I'd be happy, but no such luck!

Two months later the plank seams started to lift up and I contacted Home Depot who contacted the manufacturer who told me to use a heat gun over the seams to reactivate the glue since it is a temperature sensitive floor....hold on wait a minute, temperature sensitive? Really? So why do you put on the box "basement installation"? Basements are cold and if the glue doesn't work on the cold floors then this is misleading. (here was my review on the HomeDepot website at the time, titled "I HATE TO GIVE IT 3 STARS BUT....")

picture of the lifting seams

So Home Depot gave me the heat gun for free and I went along all the seams with the heat gun careful not to destroy the vinyl and pressed down all the seams. This took me one and a half days. A week later the seams lifted again.

I contacted the Manufacturer once more and they sent me glue which was specifically made for this floor. I was so mad that I would have to reglue every seam again. How long would that take me?
So, I contacted Home Depot again who sent two guys out to see the floor. They were stunned and told me that they would give me my money back without me having to rip it all out. They said that they had never seen anything like it before. Of course it had to be in our basement, woohoo!

I do have to say that Home Depot's customer service was great with all this mess but now I have a FREE floor that is a huge headache. I didn't really have a choice but to crawl around on my hands and knees to reglue all the seams. I also tried a couple of areas with liquid nails but the drying time was too long and the seams had to be weight down with weights during drying. This took way too long.

Everything appeared to be good again until 2 months later when the manufacturer's glue didn't work anymore. So now after our return from Germany, I don't have a choice but to do the same thing over again. This time with liquid nails and the annoying weights since those are the only areas that held up and are solid.

I feel like pulling out my hair. I can only do small sections at a time everyday. This will take me weeks! But after our trip to Germany we don't have an extra several $1000 lying around to replace the floor again.

While I'm a fan of the vinyl plank flooring in general. It looks great and doesn't swell and warp like wood and laminate, I would recommend to just buy the higher grade. Just go with the non-glue seams.

And speaking of laminate. We've had some not so nice experience with Armstrong laminate as well, but I won't get into that now too. And a couple of other flooring stories which is why I'm coming to the conclusion of us having bad luck with floors.

It felt good getting it off my chest while I'm on my hands and knees for the next couple of days (lets hope it's not for one week).
I want to work on projects that I'm passionate about again.

Until next time fellow webbers.

Tschüß