Cork Installation – Design Ideas
Q: Would it be possible for the “Experts” to assist with the Design, or make a suggestion?
With your collective experience, I’d bet y’all have some clever ideas or be able to provide some inspiration!
The cork floating floor will replace the nasty dingy beige carpet in the living room 17 Ft x 11.6 Ft (195.6 SQ FT) of my entire 1152 SQ ft 2-story townhouse and will met up with a Ceramic tile & boarder. The Mayor Champagne closely matches the tile. The Mayor Latte will just be accents in the main area and will be compatible with several colors in the tile boarder.
Truly, I don’t think ultimately, the design will be entirely appreciated or visible unless there are no furnishings in the room, which if I’m ever going to be a couch potato, a couch/sofa would be a minimum requirement! If nothing else, I just think adding the darker accents will add a little whimsy and breakup the lighter color.
Attached, I’ve included a few designs one of my friends did…
I’m leaning towards a random, staggered effect with 12 planks among the total of 66 required to complete the job.
Well, I think I’ve given you all I can to go on… but if I have overlooked anything, I might be able to scrounge something up to help!
Again, I really appreciate having a non-partial opinion!
Take care and I’ll look forward to hearing from you!
~Randy
Here is one of the designs submitted by Randy from his friend. Notice the staggering as he mentioned to get a pattern toward the center of the floor.
A: The biggest problem you are going to run into with design concepts like this is that the planks of cork are not staggered. This will lead ultimately to failure with a floating product such as the cork you are using.
Without the joints being staggered, your floor will have multiple points where four corners come together. Due to the designs of the locking mechanism used on the cork you are installing, this leaves a dead zone where portions of the locking mechanism are not connected. This means that as weight is displaced across the floor, it will move to these spots and the floor will buckle and break. When the planks are staggered, this stress is spanned across the entire floor as there are no points which a corner of the locking mechanism is meeting another corner.
The proper way to install this floor would be to stagger the rows of planks at least six inches and have the staggering across a minimum of 3 rows before repeating the pattern. I would suggest staggering about 1 foot, this way each plank is staggered in 1/3 of it’s length for the rows beside it. This will give you a simple, but stable installation.
In this sketch I have shown how to stagger the floor as well as added in a few of the darker color planks to add some design feature to the floor.