Hi all,

I found it is impossible to meet the staggering joint requirement of 10-12" for 5" wide plank, because most of them are 2-feet long. The planks are 1'-4' in length and average is 2.4'. About 50% is 2' long.

Did I buy a lemon? Any suggestions on how to deal with this situation?

By the way the wood is teak.

TIA!

I would say so... Typically you should have more of a mix with longer pieces. Your right, you can't stagger with small pieces.

Also its risk for an unstable floor later because its not "locked" together as good as it could be.

Its like starting a corner of a lego house with a only a single overlapping

One to four feet is still common with some engineered manufacturers and especially imported. I don't think it's unusual or considered a lemon. You just have to play with it. I'd try to work with 6-8 inch spacing.

Some notables that manufacture 1-4 foot lengths:

Anderson
Mannington
Armstrong

Also Mirage does this.

If you happen to have a small job it is fairly common. This is due to the fact that some manufacturers do no box up an equal amount of sizes in one box, some boxes may have more shorts than others. So you may have just gotten more boxes of shorts than boxes with longer lengths.

Have you opened up all of your boxes? If not do it before you start installing. Then I would call whom ever and complain so you can get more. But there is really no way to tell unless you open boxes.

Thanks guys for your inputs.

Ken, I forgot to mention, these are solid wood planks. Is that still not uncommon? And yes this is an import from China, some local store in northern CA.

floormeintucson, I opened up 5 boxes and they are all the same, one box is even worse with some 1.5's.

My room is not that big, about 350 sf. My wife and I laid out a small area to see and they looked quite busy.

I did a lot of searching and some say exotics are shorter, is this a fair statement. We didn't even know teak was exotics when we bought them. We just tried to get something that is harder. So really no one to blame but ourselves for being ignorant and not doing good homework

Maybe we should waste some 2's?

Thanks.

ahh, sounds a lot like acacia to me. Acacia is a short stubby tree so there are not long boards because there are no tall acacia trees. "teak" is a generic trade name given to the line by some marketing genius. i see it in many brands/manufactures but it normally has zero to do with the actual specie other than people recognize "teak" and think they have something.

That was my first thought too, but I didn't think I would be hearing it's a solid hardwood. I suppose the price was right? Not fair, but in all fairness you should have done some research like you mentioned. Busy? I'll bet it is.

Most of that solid stuff that comes from Asia is all short. Armstrong Valenza was one of the first big brands to bring in solid Asian imports that I'm aware of. I was impressed until I saw the spec on lengths. One to four feet, yet they had Brazilian Cherry, Santos, and Tigerwood to name a few. They must just chop them up overseas because most/nearly all other brands were up to 84 and 88 inches longest length. They certainly don't grow those species in Asia.

Ease of shipping in shorter lengths?

Mirage? True, but it's not as bad as before when they only had narrow strip and 3 1/4" plank...13" to 33" or something like that. Some of their stuff now is up to almost six foot...I think.