Question from Kathryn
Dear Debra,
I am very chemically sensitive, and your work has been a great help to me over the years.
We are looking into replacing the ancient carpet in our living room with a hardwood floor, but money is limited. In a smaller room we nailed down unfinished maple from Lumber Liquidators, and sealed it with linseed oil. It took about two weeks to dry completely, so this is not an option for the living room as we cannot go live somewhere else while it dries.
After reading your site, we’re considering prefinished wood, also from Lumber Liquidators, especially if we can outgas it for a while before installation. Our question is labor-related. Can we glue ash planks down to a particle board subfloor with wood glue, or does that only work with the click-together floors? (The particle board is very old, so no more outgassing from that.) Nailing it all down may be more than we can handle, but it seems all the click-together types of flooring are some type of laminate, which I think would be far too toxic for me.
In an earlier post you recommended parquet tiles from Lowes. They are far more affordable, but aren’t those made with toxic materials like other laminate floors?
My ideal would be to find a click-together hardwood, pre-finished with a natural sealant, but I haven’t been able to find any. Does it exist?
Debra’s Answer
OK 🙂
Let’s start by clearing up some words.
“Click-together” is a term used for laminate floors. Laminate floors Laminate flooring is made up of various layers of material laminated together. There’s a good illustration of what laminate flooring is made up of on the Armstrong website. The one MSDS sheet I looked at showed that brand of laminate flooring emitted formaldehyde fumes, so all in all, I don’t recommend laminate flooring. That said, a friend of mine recently installed a laminate floor all through her living room and it didn’t smell horrible.
There are some less toxic laminates certified by Greenguard. I would suggest checking the MSDS sheet for any laminate flooring you may be considering.
The prefinished parquest tiles I suggest from Lowe’s are solid wood. Oak. These fit together via what is called “tongue-and-groove.” They are not made with toxic materials like laminate floors because they are not laminate.
I don’t know how click-through installation works.
