Cork Flooring Guide

Floating floors are usually installed over an underlayment which has the role of noise insulator. This applies in almost all cases where people live in blocks, with neighbors beneath their apartment. Nobody enjoys to listen to the noise of steel high heels on ceramic tiles or on laminated flooring. Silence is a must if you share the living space with others. And since the buildings are not always properly insulated, you need to take your own measures to prevent noise from traveling freely inside the building.

If this is your major requirement from a floor, then your best option is to buy a cork underlayment. Cork is structured naturally in millions of tiny air pockets per cubic inch. These pockets compress under pressure and expand to regain their initial shape when the pressure disappears. This is where the cushioning sensation of cork floors comes from.

Thanks to this feature of cork, combined with the excellent resilience, cork floors are used in museums and other public spaces where silence is a must. Wherever noise transmission is an issue, a simple cork layer under the hardwood or engineered laminated floor is the easiest and the most elegant solution. Acoustic is better in concert halls or theaters insulated with cork. It is also useful in case of those cinema complexes where there are ten to twenty cinema halls next to each other, with a different movie being viewed in each one. You know how loud the sound can be in such situations and you probably don’t want to hear the noises from another movie than the one you are watching.

For best efficiency, cork underlayment should be installed only on clean, smooth and flat surfaces. If your floor isn’t flat, you should use that special cement to level it and only then proceed to the installation of the flooring itself.

Being a delicate operation, a proper installation of a sound barrier made of cork should be done under specialists instructions. Most retailers employ qualified and very well trained staff, who can come and install it for you, in case you don’t think you can handle it properly.

Like in the case of cork flooring, underlayment can be installed on other flooring types such as linoleum, with the exception on carpeting or some ceramic tile surfaces. This is a good point, as it saves time and money required for removing the old flooring from its place and cleaning and leveling the surface.