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.

However, if you give up the laminated model and go for parquet tiles that glue down, you can use those for your bathroom. The glue will prevent moist from penetrating between the cork layer and the subfloor, where it would develop mold, not good for the health. If you decide for cork tiles, you shouldn’t combine them with in-floor radiant heating systems. Cork is a very good insulator, and your heating system won’t be that efficient anymore, because the cork would prevent the heat to pass through and heat up your room.

Cork flooring tiles are available in various colors and patterns, depending on the manufacturer. For instance, at Ellie’s eco home store, you can have the unfinished cork tiles stained to meet your own custom design scheme. The finish they offer is with a curable oil which is so technologically advanced that makes maintenance and refinishing very simple.

If you live in a block of flats, you may value a lot one of the advantages of cork flooring: excellent sound insulation. Maybe you like to sing in the shower and you don’t want your neighbors have you reported for disturbing their silence. A noise insulating flooring and walls finish can help you safeguard your privacy.

Being slightly less expensive than many hardwood floors, and being easy to install, cork flooring is advantageous for families living on a shoe string budget. Besides, it is very resistant, both to traffic and to chemicals, and it has the property of fire retardation. This can be a significant advantage if you live in an area exposed to those summer fires that affect woods and homes nearby.

Regarding the maintenance, you should be aware that cork is a natural product, therefore its color fades to yellow if exposed to direct sunlight. Cork floors may need more frequent vacuuming and sweeping than other surfaces, because if dirt accumulates, it may accelerate the wear and your floor will soon become scratched and ugly. If you spill something on the floors, you need to wipe it as fast as you can, in order to prevent it to impregnate in the cork fiber. This can be bothering if you use to spill a lot of water while taking a shower. You’d better get yourself a shower curtain or cabin, for preventing such incidents.

This is a brief overview of the floating cork flooring installation procedure:

• Lay down the first plank in a corner of your room. The plank should be placed at a distance of 1/2″ from the walls. You’ll need to use 1/2″ spacers to help you keep the planks in place.
• Put the second plank, locking it together with the first one, on the short side, not on the long one. Locking the planks is easy – observe the indications on the flooring package and you’ll see exactly how you need to position the two planks in order for them to get assembled with ease. No glue is needed, unless you bought the glue-type of flooring.
• Continue with more planks, until you reach the opposite wall. You’ll probably need to cut the last plank in the row at the size that fits perfectly. Don’t forget about that 1/2″ that should remain free at the edges.
• The remainder of your plank will be used to start the second row of flooring. If it is very small, forget about it and use a new one. You should make sure your planks are offset at least by 10″, and not in a straight grid pattern. With a tapping block and a hammer, help the planks to get combined and locked together.
• After you’re done, clean the floor with a vacuum cleaner and a soft cloth. Then you should apply the top sealer coat with great care to spread it evenly across the surface.
• After you’re done, don’t step on your floor for at least 4-5 hours, so you give it the time to dry completely. You need to be aware that more than one week will pass until your floor will be completely cured and ready to be used.

Keep in mind that you should never install floating flooring, be it cork or laminated wood, over old carpets or on nsurfaces which are not perfectly flat. If the subfloor is not flat, you should make sure to flatten it before proceeding with your installation. Or hire a specialist to do it for you, if you feel you can’t handle it properly.

• Young couples dream to have babies, or they already have a baby or two. By the age the toddler starts crawling, the floor becomes extremely important, because the baby would spend a lot of time on it. Cork is warm and soft, it is the perfect surface to get in touch with the delicate skin of a baby who crawls. It would attenuate the hit if the baby falls down, so it’s safer than hardwood or ceramic flooring.
• How nice it feels to walk barefoot? Beneficial to our health, walking barefoot is not possible on cold surfaces. Cork is warm, so you can forget about slippers inside your house even if you don’t have in-floor heating.
• If you had the chance to design and build your own house, maybe you liked it to have irregular shapes. This looks great, but it can mean a great problem for floor specialists. Some flooring types will prove to be difficult in getting cut in irregular shapes, so you may end up with ugly finishes which you’ll hate. For such grand designs and big projects, cork flooring is the best solution: cork can be cut easily in any shape you like, and it is beautiful and elegant.
• Of course, if you don’t have enough money, you can go for linoleum or carpeting, but they have several drawbacks: linoleum is ugly and old fashioned and carpeting will get dirty and fill up with dust and will require more thorough maintenance than other flooring variants. Cork is easy to clean.

Whatever your choice may be, when choosing floors for your home, make sure you seek for advice from the floor manufacturers, because they have well-trained staff, ready to answer all your questions and to help and guide you in your purchase and even after that.

Don’t forget to plan everything before you actually start working and buying the building supplies. If your cork flooring doesn’t match the walls and the window treatments, or the furniture, you may end up in a house that’s ugly, with no defined style, expressing only your incapacity of getting your creativity unleashed and your personality revealed. Usually, this should be the task of an interior designer, but with this crisis we are crossing these days, you may not want to spend your money on things that you can do by yourself with a little bit of skills and good will. It’s your choice!

If you want to install a cork floor in your bathroom, you should be aware that this may not be such a great idea. Bathrooms are by definition humid rooms, exposed to a lot of heat and steam from your baths and hot showers. If by hazard, you didn’t manage to insulate your bathroom cork floor very well, and some water leaks between the floor and the ground, mold will develop and you’ll have a hard time in getting rid of it. Practically, you’ll have to remove and replace your cork flooring if this happens. This is only one reason for not installing cork floors in bathrooms and kitchens. Mold is very dangerous for your health. In time, it may trigger respiratory symptoms, asthma and allergies. If you have young children, they would be very exposed to such illness, because their immune system is not entirely formed, so they are at high risk of developing childhood asthma, which is chronic and they’ll have to live with it for the rest of their life. You don’t want to cause that to your kids, do you?

Even if you don’t care about the mold, although you should, there’s one more reason why cork floors and bathrooms don’t match: if you soak the cork, it will absorb the water and retain it inside, thus getting rotten after a while. Your bathroom floor will look very much like an old dock in an ancient harbor. Again, you’ll have to spend money and to go through all the hassle of replacing the flooring, because you wanted to be fashionable and forgot about common sense when you chose it.

Should you insist in your decorating madness, at least make sure you discuss your idea with a home design specialist, or with a cork flooring manufacturer or retailer. They could give you some additional advice on how to maintain your bathroom cork flooring intact and in very good shape for as long as possible. If their advice, however, is that you should only take cold showers and not more often tham once a month, maybe you should reconsider your thoughts and buy some nice, elegant, waterproof ceramic tiles and put them on your bathroom floor.

Life’s better when we make things easier. Why complicate them?