Putting carpeting on your basement floor? Think again...
Of all the surfaces in your basement, the floor is the one that is most vulnerable to water damage when the leak happens. The water will get onto and then under the floor and sit there for a long time before it dries out. It will get sucked up into the wood floors or carpets like a sponge and ruin them. We have seen many hardwood floors buckled like a beach sand at low tide. Laminate floors are simply particle board with a thin plastic finish laminated to the top surface. When they get wet, they swell at the edges between the boards. When they dry, they don’t regain their previous shape and are ruined. Just one plumbing leak will take you out.
Carpet, and carpet with padding, will soak up water like a giant sponge and will have to be taken out when it gets wet. You don’t need a huge leak to ruin these types of flooring. Water vapor passing through your porous concrete floor in a slow, invisible, unending stream from the damp earth below is enough to cause buckling, and will cause moisture to get trapped under your flooring making it smell moldy from the rotting flooring underneath. Of course, there is a solution. Several choices in fact…
Thermal Dry floor matting are modular floor tiles (that comes in carpet or tile) that snap together and each tile has raised pegs on the bottom that create an air space under the floor. This prevents water from condensing under the floor, and it creates a thermal break by putting a space between your feet and the cold, hard, concrete floor. The tiles are also water resistant. When you have a flood, just dry the place out, which is much easier with the air space under the floor, and the carpet or tile is not ruined. A few tiles can easily be popped up to blow air under the floor with a fan when needed for drying.
Advantages of Modular
If you ever have a stain or damage to one spot in the floor, in one minute you can replace that tile with another, or switch it for one from a closet or under furniture. You can’t do that with wall-to-wall carpet or any other tile! We all have high traffic areas in the room, and when we change our carpet we usually do so because one area is looking tired. With these tiles you can get many times the life out of the floor because you can change or relocate the tired tiles easily – and they won’t be affected by water or dampness.
