Cork Tiles + Dog
We’ve been renovating for a long time on a shoestring, and are hoping to finally realize rental income on this baby and move into the owner’s duplex upstairs very soon. There is one last hurdle: flooring. We will have a hardibacker subfloor over hydronic radiant heat (hardi is the thermal mass). In the future, when…
We’ve been renovating for a long time on a shoestring, and are hoping to finally realize rental income on this baby and move into the owner’s duplex upstairs very soon.
There is one last hurdle: flooring.
We will have a hardibacker subfloor over hydronic radiant heat (hardi is the thermal mass). In the future, when we have money again, we will be putting down a nice engineered wood floor, but it could really be awhile. We need an interim floor that is *very* inexpensive, won’t need to be taken up in order to put down the real floor, and will last up to 5 years, because who knows how long this economy will suck?
Cheap 4mm cork tiles seem like the way to go. They’ll stick to the hardi, are about the same thickness and material as underlayment, are supposed to be very resilient, and are only $1.49 a square foot.
I have only one doubt. One member of our family has some scritchy scratchy toenails and occasionally runs around in his bare feet, chasing balls and his tail and whatnot.
Anyone here have cork tiles (of any quality/price) and a dog? Does this work? It’s supposed to be an industrial-grade material that’s suitable for restaurants and hospitals and such, but I am skeptical.
I will tell you from experience that cheap cork tiles are a very BAD investment, especially if you have a dog. Forget the dog, do you ever wear heels, or have any chairs of any weight? All will leave marks in a cheap cork floor. Everyone jumped on the cork and bamboo bandwagon and some of what’s out there is stuff that is not nearly dense enough. You really need to stick with the reputable brands.
can you put down something cheap that doesn’t have to be glued down, like cheap carpeting or such? What about something more industrial looking, like painted ply or tinted cement?
Cork insulates, don’t use it with radiant heat. it will defeat the purpose of radiant floor heat.
Wasteful, yes….no doubt about that.
It is a tough choice to make but if the contractor thinks that this will work well then I would order a sample of the cork and try to beat the crap out of it just to see how it might hold up to the dogs wear an tear. Best of luck!
Hi PHfamily,
My heating engineer recommends 3mm cork underlayment and is not concerned with the extra 1mm in the tile solution. His take is that any underlayment that will work under a floating floor will, because of its sound-deadening properties, act as an insulator, but a very thin one that will not noticably affect the heat system, and besides, you certainly wouldn’t want to skip the sound-deadening (insulating) underlayment under a floating floor. The small increase in efficiency wouldn’t be worth the racket.
I have to pick a bone about the idea of putting down like 1500 square feet of flooring only to take it up in a couple of years. That sounds really, really wasteful to me.
We have hydronic radiant heating and were told to never use cork as an underlayment because it had too high of an R value and would retain all of the heat without transferring it to the floors. Would you be better off with a cheap laminate that would be taken up in 5 years? Remember, the thicker you make the floors the less effective the radiant heating will be…..
As for cork holding up to dog nails, I just don’t know- can you order a sample and try to scratch it or make it flake?