Yes, I said tossed. Like from waist high and about five feet away. They landed soundly on the expensive hardwood floor with a thud.

I couldn’t believe it – these folks were literally throwing 10 lb. hex head weights to the hardwood floor! I wondered, half-aloud, how they would feel if I walked into their living rooms and tossed a couple of these weights down onto their pretty hardwoods. My bet was that not too many would be happy about it if I did it once. Not to mention, grabbing twenty of my friends and having them also repeat this exercise several times a day.

As you can imagine, even though it had been installed only a very short time, this floor was pretty beat up.

Participants will do what they do, and you can only control so much of that. You can try to ask them not to throw the weights in the group exercise room, but instructors shouldn’t be the police. And really, it should be common courtesy not to toss pointed heavy objects onto a hardwood floor.

But, there are a couple of things that you can do to alleviate this. One is to trade in those hex head dumbbells for, well, almost anything else. A hex head dumbbell will tear up any surface over time – even thick rubber flooring and cement floors. If you ever find the need to tunnel out of somewhere, I hope that you’re equipped with a hex head dumbbell. You should be out in no time.

The same companies who manufacture hex head weights, also manufacture rounded dumbbells that have no obvious disadvantages. Better yet are the rounded dumbbells that are urethane or rubber coated. You can’t prevent people from tossing weights, or even just dropping them, but you can make it easier for your floors to withstand them.

But I realize that our installation crews aren’t the cheapest group you can find.  There’s a reason for that.  These guys are factory-trained and there aren’t that many who can do the job, time after time, to the level of quality that is expected of them.  Because there are few of them who are qualified, they often have to travel over several states to get to your facility.

Now, you might well be tempted to hire someone from a local flooring company who is cheaper.  That is always your option, but I would recommend that you not.  Those local flooring guys may well be experts at installing floors in homes or businesses, but sports floors are a different type of product and require unique installation techniques.  Too often we find local flooring guys disregarding our installation instructions and simply installing the floor in a way that they think is best, and the customer ends up with a floor that either performs less than it should, or isn’t as attractive as it could be.  We don’t want that, and we know that you don’t either.

I need to point out that we provide these installation crews as a service to our customers and not as a profit center for ourselves.  We make very little on installation, so the added expense is virtually all going to the installers and his crew.  In fact, scheduling and coordinating installers is a lot of work for us, but we understand that it is a necessary service that we can provide you, our customers, with.  And it’s worth it to us to make sure that you have an installation that you can be proud of for years to come.

So don’t let the cost of an install prevent you from getting the most out of the flooring investment you’ve made.

Yes, in every case, you can have your personnel install our floors.  We’ll be happy to send you installation instructions and, if they are followed to the letter, will make for a good looking installation. We’ve put a lot of time into these installation instructions and tried to think of every particular situation, using our knowledge of hundreds of installations, so please don’t just think that you know what you’re doing and dive right in without ever consulting the instructions until it is too late.  In fact, I’d encourage you to read all of the installation instructions BEFORE you install the floor.  We intentionally make them as brief as we possibly can for just that reason and they will give you a rough idea of what you might encounter before you get there.

If you have questions, please give us a call.  Everyone here has been involved with the installation of at least a few floors, so they know the answers to your questions – even the unusual ones.

One tip I can give you is to not try to get too much done in a day.  The details, especially when you are finishing the installation, are what make the difference between a good looking installation and a bad one.  If your folks are getting tired, they’ll start making sloppy mistakes, or not caring as much about the appearance of the installation as much as they did when you started. And, just when it looks like your floor is done, that’s when you have to look at the finishing touches like clean-up and baseboards and transitions that make all the difference. 

Finally, if your folks get into the installation and find that it is beyond their scope of expertise, or if the floor is not looking the way that you think it should, tell them to stop working.  We have installers around the country and they will be more than happy to finish the job for you.

Over the last year, we’ve learned a lot and are continuing to strive to ensure that everything we offer to you is the very best in service, quality, and performance.  We realize that we can never stop striving and hope that you will continue to be with us to help guide us along the way. 

We wish you all the joy of the season and look forward to an even more successful year next year.

Of course, the thing about turning on the heater is that it more quickly dries water in the air and this dramatically reduces the humidity in your building.  In fact, over time, like after an especially hard or long winter, the humidity never has an opportunity to rise at all.  Surprisingly, this can make life really difficult for your hardwood floors.

You see, a hardwood floor expands and contracts based on the humidity of the environment that it is installed in.  The fibers in the wood fill up with moisture when it’s humid, and shrink back down when it’s not.  When the humidity is greatly reduced through heating, the boards become much narrower and somewhat shorter.  In a nailed-in floor, this often leads to noticeable gaps between floor boards and at the ends of the boards.  In a free-floating floor, this means that the floor will often shrink away from the wall, creating wide gaps around the outside of the room.  In some extreme cases, it will actually cause cracking within the boards itself.

Most wood flooring manufacturers suggest that you keep the humidity between 35%-50%, which can be a bit of a challenge in the winter.  If you don’t have humidifiers in your existing HVAC system, it’s not a bad idea to get a portable humidifier to put in a corner of the room, just for the worst of the winter months.  Don’t count on just the activity in the room and the sweat to keep the humidity high.  It does boost humidity, but only temporarily and not enough to help the flooring.  An alternative is to turn the heat way down at night, or when no one is using the room.  It not only helps keep humidity higher, but also reduces your electric bills!

So, as we approach winter, keep those relative humidity guidelines in mind and look for strategies to keep the moisture up.  Your floors will thank you.

Let’s first look at the construction of the boards themselves.  In this market, there are two main types of hardwood flooring – solid and engineered.  Solid flooring is a pretty self-explanatory term, indicating that the boards are made of solid pieces of wood.  The advantage of a solid floor is that after years of use, the floor can be sanded down and refinished a number of times.  These types of boards are often nailed to a subfloor, or “sleepers”, which are 2” X 3” strips of wood that are laid under the hardwood.

As I mentioned, the other type of flooring is an engineered product.  Until a few years ago, this was more commonly referred to as a “laminate floor”.  Basically, about half the thickness of the board is made up of plywood, with solid pieces of hardwood glued to the top of it.  Installation of an engineered product is referred to as “free-floating’ since the boards are installed simply by being glued to the adjoining boards, and not secured to the subfloor.  Thus the floor is considered to be “floating” above the subfloor, typically over a foam layer or strips.  One of the great things about a floating system is that it is allowed to move up and down on the foam, making it more resilient. 

Our wood systems are unique, in that they take the best parts of a solid – the ability to be refinished a number of times – and are assembled in a way that it is still free-floating – which is more resilient.  Our boards are held together by using a removable installation clip, which also firmly holds the boards to each other, but also allows you to take up and relocate your flooring without loss of your initial flooring investment.

Sound perfect for group exercise?  Well, that’s what the testing seems to tell us.

Let me explain – for years we’ve been trying to convince people to get carpeting out of their CV areas and replace it with rubber. There are a lot of problems with commercial carpeting in a weight room. It absorbs sweat, it stains easily from oil used to lubricate the machines, as well as spills, it’s hard to clean, and the cleaning process tends to actually shorten the lifespan of the carpet. Worse is that commercial carpet tended to release small fibers that would get into the lubricating oil in the machines, and this would create more wear and shorten the life of these expensive pieces of CV equipment. The best answer to this was to put down equipment mats under every piece of equipment that you had. At that point, why not replace the carpet with solid rubber flooring, which had none of these problems?

Of course, rubber flooring does not have all the aesthetic qualities of carpet. There just isn’t the design flexibility with rubber that there is with carpet.

But, in the last few years, a new type of carpeting has been developed, that allows you the design flexibility without the problems of earlier carpeting. This material does not use a woven fabric, but rather a polypropylene plastic fiber that is needle punched through an asphalt backing. This makes for a carpet that is actually completely anti-microbial and unable to stain or mildew. It also eliminates the fraying and occasional “zippering” that you would find with a woven carpet, and does not allow the release of those small fibers that get into your equipment. Additionally, it does not indent from having heavy equipment placed on it. But aesthetically, it looks the same as a woven carpet.

So, you see that over the years, we’ve encouraged people to take out their carpet in favor of rubber, and now we’re back to carpet again. A new and better suited carpet, that is. We call ours CarpeTile Sport and it’s warranted for a full seven years. If you’re remodeling your CV area, it’s a great choice to consider….again.

Well, it’s a growing concern about composite wood floors that are glued together using glue that contains formaldehyde. Problem with formaldehyde is that it off-gasses over time and this exposure to formaldehyde gas has been shown to be cancerous over time. As a result, there have been stricter regulations about the use of formaldehyde glue in the manufacturing of composite floors.

Inherently, since they are made of strips of bamboo that are glued together, bamboo is also a composite floor. Indeed, early bamboo floors were made using urea formaldehyde adhesives, and this particular brand of formaldehyde glue emits the highest level of formaldehyde.

That was then. Now bamboo manufacturers use a type of glue that is referred to as “No Added Urea Formaldehyde”, or NAUF. This is not addressed in the article, but it is important to note that our Zenterra flooring has none of the off-gassing that has found to be harmful.

This is going to be a question that people will need to have increasingly addressed, as regulation against the use of formaldehyde in flooring increases. Just wanted to let you know that we’re ready for it, and encourage regulation that increases the safety of both plant workers and owners of bamboo flooring.

If you’d like to read the article, you can visit it here: http://hardwoodfloorsmag.com/articles/article.aspx?articleid=1551&zoneid=2.

We’ve been going to this show in Chicago for so long, it’s going to be hard to imagine it in any other city. So long ago, that I recall when it used to be held in the expo areas in the basement of the Chicago Hilton and Towers, before McCormick Place was even being built. Chicago is a great town and while I’ll miss going there every year, the move to another city has been needed for some time. There are plenty of other markets in this country that could benefit from the exposure that a fitness show like this has to offer.

We’ll be there in booth 631, representing DuraFlex rubber tiles for the US market, but we’ll also have samples and literature on our other products if you would like some more information. Come by and visit us while you’re wandering the exhibits. There have been some product upgrades that we’d like to show you. Feel free to ask for me, Steve, or Mark when you get there. Have a good show!

When we first introduced a clip-system group exercise floor, over 30 years ago now, we presented the US market with the first floor that had been shown to meet or exceed the DIN Standards.  The DIN Standards were German benchmarks for safe flooring and they simply had never before been utilized over here.  They soon became recognized by many leading professionals in the research field as the ideal specifications for dance-exercise flooring.  Since that time, every manufacturer in the wood sports flooring industry has had their flooring tested using the DIN Standards.  In fact, we still regularly have our flooring tested to ensure that it still maintains the quality needed to pass these exacting standards.

But we don’t limit ourselves to testing just for safety.  We also test our product for its physical characteristics.  Flame testing, expansion testing, moisture testing, finish testing, and testing to see how our product reacts to water spills are just some of the many ways that we have our wood flooring examined.  All of these are to try to determine how we can create the best performing floor, and what changes we can make to make it perform even better.  We invest quite a bit in all this testing, so feel free to ask us about the reports – we’re happy to share results with you.