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My DH is trying to think ahead as he plans to install a click lock engineered floor, over a sound and moisture barrier, over concrete.
What should he do where the floor meets the French exterior door? Same question regarding where the floor meets a concrete hearth? He is thinking the strips butting up to these areas need to be glued? Is that right, or is he missing something?
Thanks, elnina, but there is no lip on the door to accept T-molding and the floor will not be able to go under the cement hearth. In both instances, the floor will butt up to these areas with nothing to hold the edge down. Everywhere else, the baseboards will hold down, and hide the edge of, the floor.
We are getting an estimate to remove the concrete hearth, but even so, the floor might still butt up to concrete there.
As with any other type of "hard surface" installation- shoe mold.
Glue/adhesive tends to defeat the purpose of "floating".
In layman's term it would be a quarter round, but shoe mold is the correct term. Should be attached to door threshold, and or fireplace, and independent of floating floors.
Clarify, please.
So you mean that shoe mold should be hammered into the concrete hearth, and hammered into the floor in front of the door frame (since it can't be nailed to the bottom of the door frame)? I thought you nailed molding into the wall, not the floor?
I would assume the exterior door has some type of threshold? There are many methods of attachment depending on type of material. Let's say the threshold is aluminum. The base shoe could be screwed on with a finish screw. You could nail it to the floor if the nail penetrated as far away from required expansion clearance as possible.
The brick will be the most difficult. You could use the above method, or maybe plastic anchors with the screw set just under the finish to allow for putty. You could set the anchors in the motor joints if brick is too brittle. Glue IMHO would just make a mess.
The previous posters are correct, you have a floating floor and you cannot glue it down or permanently seal it. It can move as much as 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch depending on the humidity. That's why it' called floating. You sure don't want to deal with buckling on a laminate floor. That would be a major repair headache.
We laid moulding down on the surface of our laminate floor cut it to size and dabbed liquid nail on the back side of the moulding and then pushed it up against our hearth using some bricks on newspaper (to prevent scratching the laminate) to hold it in place. It looks great and the floor can move under it.
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