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- Updated: 03/19/2011
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My wife and I were fixing up a room in the basement that would house our workout gear and be used as an occasional bedroom when company arrives. The basement can be damp, although we run a dehumidifier continuously and also circulate the A/C through this space. With the A/C and dehumidifier going, the humidity in the basement is normal.
Nothing about this room was particularly easy and we considered various types of flooring. We decided on a laminate flooring by Harmonics, similar in construction and appearance to Pergo brand flooring. It was on sale at Costco for about $24 per 17 square-foot package, which is a good price for this type of flooring. In particular, the Harmonics product I bought is called ",Select Maple", and it promised to be a quick snap-together installation.
Harmonics flooring consists of planks about 48 inches long and 7.5 inches wide. The planks are about 5/16 inch thick. The finished surface is a light maple veneer that looks okay from a distance but won',t fool you into thinking it',s real maple from a couple feet away. The planks have tongues and grooves along all edges, so that pieces attach together firmly. The design of the tongues and grooves is such that the planks snap together and don',t require nailing or glue. They also easily unsnap, which turned out to be important to us during the installation.
To properly install Harmonics Glueless Laminate Flooring, we bought Harmonics installation kits, which included installation tools and plastic foam underlayment material. Using Harmonics', underlayment material, the instructions said we could install the planks over a concrete floor, which is what we intended to do.
The first step of the installation was therefore installing underlayment material, which came in three-foot wide rolls. One edge had a couple of adhesive strips that let us stick each row to the row before. It was pretty quick going and self-explanatory.
Then came installing the actual flooring planks. The instructions say to keep it 3/8 inch from the walls all around, which turned out to be easier said than done. For one thing, most flooring trim boards are 5/8 inch thick, which leaves a very small margin for error. We quickly decided to get closer to the wall than 3/8 inch. Harmonics', installation kit has little spacer wedges that help you keep a gap at the wall and we ended up using them. Even still, there are some places where our floor trim just barely hides the installation gaps around the perimeter of the floor. Trimming around doors is tricky.
The floor almost, but not quite, snaps together. Each of our courses of flooring used more than one board, so we made the entire course the right length, snapped them together end-to-end, and attempted to snap them into the previous course. This worked occasionally and it was beautiful when it happened. More often, we had to use a tapping block (supplied in the installation kit) to get the two courses seated properly. If I held the tapping block just a little off, tapping it with a hammer caused the edge of the plank to chip, permanently damaging the plank. I damaged three or four planks before I finally learned this lesson. In one case, I had moved several courses past the damaged plank, only to see it later. This meant I had to lift up all the subsequent courses to remove and replace the damaged plank. To its credit, the Harmonics Glueless Laminate floor lifts back up perfectly.
Living With It
Once installed, the Harmonics Glueless Laminate floor looks good. However, I can',t shake the feeling that it is fragile, much more fragile than a Pergo floor that I installed in my kitchen. I have the impression that a dropped tool or dragged bit of furniture will permanently damage the floor. I haven',t seen this yet but, then again, I don',t want to test it.
I do have a spot in the middle of the room where the floor has puckered, as though it has gotten wet. I do have cats and can',t watch them every minute, so it',s possible that a cat peed on this spot. However, they are adult cats and litterbox trained, and I have no evidence that the cats caused this pucker. My wife has already raised the subject of removing the floor to replace these damaged planks and that is just more work than I want to do. It would involve removing much of the trim that we so painstakingly installed -- I just don',t want to do that unless there is no other choice.
Therefore, we are now considering covering much of our Harmonics Glueless Laminate floor with a rug, hiding the puckered spot. I can',t be the only one who finds it ironic that we may cover our new composite laminate floor with a carpet.
Still, the Harmonics floor looks good and has certainly brightened the room. I just don',t have a lot of confidence in its durability. You can click on the first picture above for a look at my finished basement with the Harmonics floor. The cabinets on the left are from Ikea, and the white frame on the wall will be for knick-knacks and storing various straps/belts for our exercise equipment. Like so much of what we do in our house, it is hand-built specifically for this purpose. The second picture shows the water-damaged spot in the floor, which appeared perhaps a month after the floor was installed. The damaged spot is in the center of the picture, to the left of the pen.
Harmonics Glueless Laminate Flooring is an average product but not exceptional. It is probably better for an upstairs bedroom or a library room than it is for a room in a basement or where there will be the potential for heavy scratching traffic. If I were to do it again, I would probably use a different product.
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