The Worst Overwood I've Ever Seen

I "flew" to a job that was about 2 hours away last week. Actually, I drove, but my client offered to fly me. So, something wasn't quite right with this inspection. Nice couple, decades-old home that was being remodeled. New factory-finished flooring in the two bedrooms downstairs, and site-finished Brazilian cherry in the living and dining rooms upstairs. The complaints were gaps and close joints in the flooring downstairs, and splits, gaps and overwood in the BC upstairs.

Furniture had been moved back into the bedrooms downstairs. There were some gaps in the flooring, mostly at end joints. Fill had been used per manufacturer instructions, and it wasn't a bad job. And there were some H-joints and stair step joints, but those were mostly hidden by the furniture. Nothing was an obvious feature of the floor. The big problem was that the flooring had been scratched from moving furniture around in the room. And the installers had not moved furniture.

The upstairs flooring was a different story. The stuff was so twisted and bowed that I can't imagine how the installers ever got it put down. The bigger question is why they continued putting down obviously bad flooring. Some of the groove edges had split. The overwood was the worst I have seen.

Boards were different widths. Some boards were twisted by 1/8" from corner to opposite corner. Symptoms indicate that the flooring was milled very wet, and that the subsequent drying caused the twisting, bowing and shrinkage.

I don't think the BC floor can or should be saved. The downstairs factory-finished floor was OK… until it got scratched. That's not a manufacturing issue, and was not caused by the installers. But I think the homeowners wanted me to say that floor needed to be replaced because of installation errors, as well.