Seagull , What type of Adhesive did you purchase for your floor? Was it a Urethane? I had a Bamboo cup on me a few years back because the store we installed the project for sold the home owner a water based adhesive. I have seen cupping happen on inspections i have been called in on and they were all from moisture transmitting from the sub-floor.Especially with solid products. A 9ply product with a 4 mil wear layer should be a very stable floor when glued down with the correct adhesive and it shouldn't be cupping. The installation may have been installed correctly with the exception of using the correct adhesive. If they used a water based adhesive and it is cupping and the manufacturer recomends a urethane in your installation specifications, it will be on the company that sold you the wrong adhesive and the installer if they didn't use the correct adhesive. I would refer to your invoice and see what type of adhesive was used on the project. I have been installing floors for 20 years and i have never had an engineered product cup on me nor have i have ever seen or heard about one cupping. I always recomend a urethane based adhesive on all of our products for this same reason. It defintely doesn't sound right to me unless you are pouring water on that floor when you clean it or you flat out have a moisture issue and they didn't test for moisture before the floor was installed. I will discuss this with my Armstrong Rep on monday when he comes in and see what he has to say. Here is a link that might be useful: S&M Hardwood

I am so glad you posted a follow up with lots of pictures! The flooring is beautiful! As lynn said, the rich color is gorgeous. It's so nice to see another Lauzon installed floor : ) The marble looking tile in the bathroom is really nice, too. It's good you mentioned the brand & name. The window shutters & wall color look great. I like the overall feel of the whole place. Your 82 year old mother must love her new space. I am amazed that she likes to wear heels. She must have strong healthy feet & legs. Our Lauzon engineered floor has been walked on MANY times with women's heeled shoes. It hasn't caused dents. However, if someone has spiked/very pointed heels, I bet that may cause a problem...not certain. They say allergies are reduced quite a bit when carpet is replaced with wood. You help take good care of your mother & her home. She's lucky to have you & I'm sure vice versa : )

I hear what you're saying, and appreciate the replies. I'm no kind of expert, but I'm quite sure this was the wood and not the substrate. They removed the first floor, then cleaned and re-floated the slab and tested it - it was perfect. Coming out of the box, many boards were significantly bowed and some were set aside. If the installer was at fault at all, it was in that they laid so much of the floor before I saw it and halted the job. If one didn't know that the floor was supposed to be flat and seamless, they might have accepted this job. It is only because I'd had the same floor that I knew it wasn't right, I think many customers would have accepted it. Something must have gone wrong for that wood between the time it left Lauzon and arrived in my home, perhaps it was stored incorrectly during the summer? The extra wood from the first job that has been in my attic for three years is also crowned, I'll make sure to store extra boards from this job in a closet or something. The new floor is almost done, it is the wider Sapele boards with the small bevel. I changed the style to protect myself from seeing any errors this time...I just don't want to know, and have to get back in my house. I may really miss the square edge, but the wood is gorgeous and the longer boards are good for my large rooms. I'm so grateful for these forums, I've been on several during the last couple months and really appreciate how many experienced and thoughtful people take the time to post and help others.

Update: The cabinet install continues. I followed eandhl's advice, and laid out the stone samples on the cabs, with the "aged", darker wood samples on hand as well. Getting a good sample of the Brazilian dream was actually no mean feat, since the samples I've gotten previously were all merely chipped off corners of slabs, and were not even close to representative of the slab as a whole. A call to our fabricator to see if they had a remnant laying around led them to call the stone yard where we had reserved our slabs-- voila, we had a 2'x 2' sample that we could borrow. That said, the sample still wasn't 100% similar to our slabs-- ours had more white and red veining in it, but the orange/brown minor veining was comparable. It was really helpful for me to see the bigger sample with the cabinets. And the verdict: It looked great with both the current wood and the older samples, but I think I agree with those of you who suggested it would be a bit much. All the movement definitely becomes the star attraction (and perhaps would do so even more with our slab, with more strident coloring and veining), to the detriment of the cabinets. I'm not sure these pics really give that sense, but here they are anyway, with a seafoam green sample pic also. We love the Brazilian dream--great colors, movement, and there's a slight iridescent depth to it in a lot of places (unfortunately, you can't see this in the pics). The veining feels very marble-y to me, which I really like (the SO had nixed the idea of marble early on). The seafoam green just feels a bit more grounding to us. And we like the satin finish better (or rainwash--can't remember now, nor am I certain they're different...). So, barring a change of heart when we come back tomorrow to start our move back from our temporary digs (landlords came back from overseas, and our project is, as we could have expected, running a bit long), I think we will be going with the seafoam green. Couple of other tidbits I learned today: 1. Brazilian dream also goes by the name Nacarado. You can find a lot more from the Google using the latter than you can with the former. I stopped by another stone yard while on my quest for the mother of all samples-- this was the place that had previously labeled this stone "Van Gogh." This had confused me, since the web seems to associate "Van Gogh" with a stone that also goes by "Luisa blue" or something like that--totally different (though spectacular, in a bright blue, very colorful kind of way). Nacarado/Brazilian dream is apparently a quartzite, not a granite. One of the websites I saw, from a stone peddler called ARC, says this: "Nacarado is a smooth creamy amber colored quartzite, with delicate fine brownish gold veining. Some lots of Nacarado extracted from the top portions of the quarry may present heavy rust color resulting from infiltration of iron oxide. ARC opts to stock only the cleanest Nacarado available on the market, which is quarried deep in the bedrock, with minimum rust coloring." And indeed, the pic of their slab is a fairly uniform "creamy amber," without any of the red, white, orange/brown, which is actually what drew me to it in the first place. Interesting stone. 2. The guy who's installing our cabs drew my attention to how variable the appearance of sapele is in different light, and from different angles. Indeed, here are 2 pics of our older sapele samples, with both of them rotated about 180 degrees in the second pic. Same light, same camera settings. Interesting wood. That's all for now. Gotta get back to packing. I'll post pics under a new thread once we're further along. (Next week: cab install completed, stone templated, floors refinished, painting, maybe some backsplash tiling.)