According to the Shaw website you linked:
And it says it's a hardwood, rather than an engineered wood.
No, it says hardwood rather than carpet, rugs, laminate, resilient, tile, or stone. All of the engineered wood floor say hardwood as the flooring type.
It says that So you need to get the question answered, is this a solid hardwood or an engineered wood?
It is in the Epic Plus series of Engineered hardwood flooring, containing a proprietary center layer they call stabilitex. It appears that it is supposed to be this manufacturers best kind of engineered hardwood flooring, or at least the best for the environment.
As to the floor, I think you need to go with the floor leveler. Use the self leveling option if you don't have anyone who can do the other. If you think it's possible that you'll need moisture barriers, see if you can do it with paint instead of an under layment.
I stopped by Lowes today (while returning some drywall and picking up some lumber, nails, etc for Habitat) and saw some of the other floor leveler options, but the cheapest would still cost $14 and would require more skill to install. The contractor with whom I'm working at Habitat said that he has used the self leveling kind before and found it really easy, but is unsure about the other kind. I'll probably go ahead and get the self leveling kind, but might ask our neighbor if he has experience with floor leveling first.
For floor height, what's your difference between how high this flooring will be compared to the flooring in adjacent rooms?
The new flooring is 3/8 of an inch thick.
The only adjacent interior room of the house is the kitchen, which has linoleum flooring. I haven't measured it relative the underlying slab, but am sure the height is practically negligible. It doubt it is much more than 1/16 of an inch.
The old metal transition piece between the carpet and the linoleum is 3/8th of an inch thick, the same as the thickness of the new flooring. Where the carpet is worn the thinnest it (including the pad below it) is just as thick as the new boards, ignoring any underlayment. Where the carpet is less worn it come up higher than the new flooring would.
There is a screen porch on the other side of the exterior door. The porch has a very thin outdoor carpet over a slab that seems to be perfectly even with that in the den (and equally unlevel). The porch slab ends at the same point (on the other side of the wall) where the den's slab is cracked.
(I suspect it was the porch settling that caused the crack in the den. When the house was first built in 1961, it had a concrete slab extending about 8ft past the exterior wall to form a patio on the whole back side of the house. Around 1980, the former home owners converted the patio to a den and a screen porch. They poured more concrete to extend the slab about 5 ft further to enlarge the den, but for the porch they added a new roof supported by new studs secured at the edge of the old slab. After more than 30 years of carrying weight it was never designed to bear, the porch settling only a quarter inch is not so bad. The concrete past the crack in the den was originally designed to hold its full load, so it did not settle so much.)
When I pulled back the carpet a couple days ago I measured about 7/8th of an inch gap between the slab and the bottom of the door frame on one side and 1 1/4 inch gap on the other. The side of the door where the slab is lower relative the door is about a foot away from the crack.
(I can't find a level here to check, but I believe the door frame is level while the slab below it near the crack is not.)
Also, I'm not sure if I understood you concerning the trim pieces, but if you are putting down flooring, look to remove the base trim from the walls, and put your new flooring all the way up to the walls, not up to the existing trim. And then replace the base trim pieces. That looks much better as a finished job than adding trim to the bottom.
Well, I already bought the quarter rounds. I guess I could return them and buy new trim instead, but it would be a hassle and additional expense. (I'd have to carry them in my dad's van which lacks air conditioning in weather that would likely be over 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and would be paying for it out of my own $15/hr paycheck.)
Most of our house uses the standard style of trim, but this room uses the kind which has no flat front surface but curves all the way from top to bottom with one side thicker than the other. (It was apparently very popular in the 1980s. I just ripped the last of it out of a Habitat rehab house we were demoing today.) The same stuff is used for base board, doors, and window trim. The thicker end faces away from the doors and windows, as is usual, but for the base board is on top rather than the bottom in this case.
This room also already has quarter rounds in the corners where the walls meet, and the adjacent kitchen has quarter rounds where its baseboards or cabinets meet its floor. (Of course, those rounds and baseboards are not in great shape, but could use serious cleaning and preferably repainting if I could match the original trim color. It is also used for the pantry and cabinets, so unmatching trim would be a major change.)
If I replace the den's baseboard trim I think I'd at least have to replace all of the door, threshold, and probably window trim to match. There is a good chance I'd damage the fake wood paneling walls in the process and need to replace them too. I'd likely at least need more touch up paint for the walls.
I'd really rather replace everything in this room, including the walls and the stippled ceiling, but can't afford to let the project scope creep that much.
I know what you mean but just to make sure
re floating floor method the method I mostly use
check the specifications regarding clearance from wall, the gap between wall and cut edge of flooring that the trim covers ( 10mm ALL AROUND THE ROOM should do but check the specs )
if moisture problems occur the floor will bow up or push the walls out and it can be dramatic and teaches a valuable lesson when it happens--- the lesson is always double check the product specifications before hand
Most of the sources I read said to leave 3/8 of an inch, which would be 9.525 mm. (A few recommended only 1/4 inch or as much as 1/2 inch.) I was planning to use the samples of other 3/8 inch hardwood flooring I picked up as spacers.
Since the existing baseboard was installed with the narrow end down, it could not cover even half of the gap I'm supposed to leave. The quarter round could cover plenty though.
Mr. Cutlass is right -- real men don't use quarter-round. Remove the old base and trash it. Also cut off the bottoms of door casings and anything other impediment.
The crack I would handle by doing a rough fill with the floor adhesive the day before laying. This will give you an idea of the awful sticky mess you're about to experience. If you screw this up, you can attack with a belt sander or even a plane.
This is an engineered wood product; if it's still boxed, unpack it now to let it acclimate and outgas.
Not necessary but couldn't hurt.
What floor adhesive do you mean? The leveler? Just the glue meant for the engineered hardwood?
I don't have a belt sander, but might be able to borrow one from habitat. I do own a decent craftsman sheet sander.
A description of the self leveling product online says it is not sandable of paintable though.
Unpacking, getting acclimated and outgassing is always a good idea.
All good advice. Be careful cutting the door frame, try to get it flat to the new flooring going in, but not very tight, just butted. Don't be in a rush on this step particularly. An angle for the frame lifted off the floor on one end, even the tiniest bit, will bug you forever.
I received 8 unopened boxes and the equivalent of 2 1/2 boxes that had been opened. I opened one of the formerly unopened boxes to count and compare the pieces, but left the other 7 packed as they were. They are just in cardboard boxes though without any sort of air tight wrapping, so I wouldn't expect having them opened or closed would matter a lot.
The material has already been lying in the room where I plan to install it for almost two weeks. (Actually, due to the lack of space in a room still filled with furniture, half of the boxes are instead in the adjoining kitchen.) I won't have time to devote to the project until the week after next anyway, so it will have had almost a month to acclimate.
It might be worth noting that the refrigerator is very close to the transition between the kitchen and den, and that the water heater is in a closet on the screen porch not too far from the exterior door. If either of those end up leaking they would be the most likely sources of moisture reaching the new floor.
I really should clean up a lot more, get better lighting, as well as pull the carpet back and remove the tar paper that covers the last few feet of the slab so you can see better, but here are a few pictures of the present state taken with my cell phone.
