I moved into a newly built condo located in NY last fall. The floors are oak tongue & groove laid over 1/4" cork over concrete and were installed sometime last summer. I believe that when first installed, there were no major problems (at least, not noticeable to a layperson), but by the time we moved in, the weather had significantly cooled and gotten drier, resulting in minor gaps between the floorboards and bounciness in a couple spots where I'm assuming the subfloor is not level. As winter progressed, those minor, under 1/8" gaps grew to near 1/2" and the bouncy spots got worse, trampoline-like. As this is new construction, the builder is obligated to make repairs, but they put me off all winter. Starting May or so, the gaps & bounciness got much better & the builder now refuses to do anything saying there's no problem anymore.

My 1st question is, would at least the gaps get solved by reinstalling the affected floors in the winter when they are "shrunken"? So in the winter, there'll be no gaps & in the summer, the floors will expand, but hopefully, into the expansion joint under the baseboards? I could see this helping with the bounciness, too.

My 2nd question is, is a humidifier the easy fix? The gaps / bounciness are all in one general area, a stretch of hallway and the bedroom bedside it. I've never used a humidifier so I don't know how well one would work for my issue. But if it's as simple as leaving a humidifier on in the hallway during the winter, I may just do it if it means not having to deal with the builder anymore and not getting my floors ripped up.

The warranty on our floors will run out in a few months so I need to figure out whether I can manage our flooring issues on our own (a la humidifier) or if I'll have to go after the builder. Thanks in advance!

im going to take wild guess and assume you have a bamboo floor? more specifically strand woven floated?

with forced air heat?

Hi James, no, actually, they are oak floating floors.

Lemme take a wild guess, click lock, maybe from Bruce? I love guessing games.

Here is the link for the floors:
http://duchateaufloors.com/product/san-tropez/

Clicking on "quality engineered" pulls up the specs. These are floating floors. I'm inferring that you and James think the flooring is the problem and I wouldn't disagree. I overheard the installers complain to each other that they always have problems with this product. Unfortunately, neither they nor we had any say! The builder chooses & I'm guessing these floors were pretty cheap.

Any advice on how we should go about this? Changing out to different flooring isn't an option because we simply can't afford it. Many TIA!

thats no cheap floor, its retails over 12 bucks a foot. I would expect NY winters to be pretty dry and some supplemental humidification will be necessary to keep the floor stable.

I'm not a fan of any click lock wood floors because they change dimensionally so much it results in unlocking of the locking mechanism, especially stranded bamboo. Oh sure I've done a few but they get the humidifier treatment.