I have a roughly 6'x6' foyer entrance from the garage door. It is our ground level on concrete. I had a contractor who did the stairs in oak treads/risers, and upper hallway in 3/4" Bruce Fulton Strip. The work there was excellent. They worked on the engineered piece with Bruce Northshore Strip yesterday, and when I got home to inspect I notice when I walked over some areas you can hear the sound of the wood strips "pop". I also got on my knees and applied downward pressure on some of the wood strips and you can see it move downward.

Does this indicate bad installation, insufficient glue-down material, uneven concrete surface, something else? Also what is best to trasition to berber carpeting from the engineered wood floors? Threshold or T-Molding?

Sounds like low spots in the substrate. Glues that don't hold the ridges, like Bostiks Best, or I used one today called SikaBond T55, that didn't hold its ridges(stunk and burned my eyes) When using a glue that flattens out, flattness of the substrate needs to be better then specified!!!

What does this mean?

How many hours had the adhesive set before it was walked on Timm?

In this industry, we use notched trowels to evenly and properly spread glue. The notches vary in sizes and depths. When you run a trowel accross glue you should get an exact ridge (shape of notch) from the trowel.

Then when you lay the wood on it it evenly presses to the floor and you don't have glue sqeezing out the sides of your plank.

By "not holding its ridges", he means that the glue is to runny.

Kinda hard to explain. But, if you've done it before you will know.

I knew that KG, I was just playin' with Perry. It sounds to me he found a floor that was installed correctly!

Jerry,

I had initially walked on the floor about 6 hours after installation. It has since been 48 hours, and still the same popping sound in the same areas of the floor. I wanted to get opinions from experts on this board, so that I can understand my options with the contractor when they come back for a post-installation visit in two weeks.

After initially posting my questions, I did read through all posts on this particular forum/board and it seems like this popping/hollowness is generally a widespread problem if not done or prepped correctly. As I understand it now, most likely the contractor didn't check for level of the subfloor (concrete) before installation. What methods are used to level a concrete floor first? Or will a better glue and proper application help solve this issue? And is the drilling small hole and injection method used that often and does it work? Thanks.