Good News for Florida Residents who want REAL Hardwood flooring

You’re also up against a challenge if you’re building on a slab foundation, ( and everyone does in Florida) especially in flood-prone areas. The reason: water. If water makes it through the front door, it’s good-bye, finished floor.
But customers increasingly want the world below grade — and live in greater and greater numbers in hurricane and flood zones. They don’t always realize that the moisture present (or potentially present) is a challenge builders must solve before they cut the first piece of 2-by.
Even with sump pumps, perimeter drains, and proper landscaping and guttering outside, there’s always the potential for water penetration. After all, water always — and inevitably, thanks to gravity — seeks the lowest point. That’s tough to forget when your customer requests cherry floors, raised panel wainscot, or hardwood column wraps in their downstairs upgrade. You know that if a washing machine line bursts, water breaches the the house every drop of water is making a disastrous bee-line for the lowest point in the structure.
There’s no way around the fact that accidents will happen and a catastrophic flood will do plenty of damage. But the key to building out a structure that has the greatest fighting chance of surviving small amounts of water — while creating a substrate that gives your customers the most flooring options — is to give the water somewhere to go that’s away from the finished floor and the furnishings on top of it.
That’s where DRIcore® comes in. DRIcore is a modular subfloor system that consists of engineered wood panels bonded to a rigid, moisture-resistant polyethylene sheet with a molded-in grid pattern on the underside. The grid design lifts the wood core off of the concrete, which allows small amounts of water to drain away and keeps dampness away from the finished floor. The resulting 1/4-inch space also permits air to circulate between the concrete floor and the subfloor to help to dry up moisture.
The 2-foot-by-2-foot DRIcore panels have a tongue-and-groove design and are installed as a floating floor directly over the concrete. You do have to patch large floor cracks and use a self-leveling compound with a seriously uneven floor before installing DRIcore, but small uneven spots in the concrete can be fixed using the DRIcore leveling shims. DRIcore panels can be easily cut to fit around pipes, columns and other obstructions. You can add new partition walls right on top of it.
Once the system is in, cover it with the proper underlayment for your customer’s floor selection and rest easy (okay, easier) knowing that if water does get in, it has a way to get back out without destroying everything in its path.



Click here to see a time lapse video of Dri-Core Installation in a Florida Coastal Home

www.dricore.com