All floating floors must have a moisture barrier installed. I've read the installation requirements for the marmoleum click-together flooring tiles and they are NO DIFFERENT from any other high-end laminate.

In fact, these floors are NOT allowed in bathrooms nor recommend for areas with HIGH splash/wet zones (like entrance ways, etc). That means they have all the tendencies of laminate = same plastic vapour barrier required that all floating floors require.

You can find the installation instructions on the Marmoleum website. If in doubt, use 6mil poly sheeting properly taped at the seams. Do not use in bathrooms. Have fun.

Thank you for your input! We had the floor installed in our kitchen a few weeks ago, a few days before Christmas. They put some kind of vapor barrier over the concrete first. I don’t know if they taped the edges or anything. Within a few days the edges of the click tiles started to lift very slightly. So the corners and the edges— not all of them of course but several. One place has already chipped off slightly along one of the raised edges. None of these things are glaringly terrible but I feel it’s very bad that it started doing this just a few days after install.

The installer is saying it’s from hydrostatic pressure coming up from the concrete. Is that possible in just a few days and in the middle of winter when everything is frozen? They did an overall crappy-ish job and didn’t leave enough expansion in several areas, so I just don’t trust them.

The answer is surprisingly clear: "...and they didn't leave enough expansion..."

You are experiencing a poor installation. If they are claiming "hydrostatic pressure" then they are admitting to a vapour barrier that was poorly installed (ie. not to manufacturer's specifications). If the expansion gap was not maintained as per manufacturer's guidelines, then you have "installation error".

I have seen this type of "lipping" when a cork floating floor has been SLAMMED together with too much force (and marmoleum click is put together in exactly the same way as cork...and the marmoleum surface contains cork so it acts in the same way). The edges of the planks pucker upwards. Sound familiar. Again, this is installation error.

When a floor with an HDF fibreboard core is installed in a kitchen the 'common sense' approach is to use a seam sealer on the edges of the floor in the "splash zones" (around the sink and in front of the dishwasher). This is the extra effort that makes these floors well worth their price tag. The linoleum itself is water proof but the fibre board CORE is NOT. Therefore the seam sealer is *required in splash zones.

And to be clear, a tube of seam sealer is $20 and will seal 50 - 60 sf of flooring. It takes an extra 30 minutes to use this product during installation for those 60sf.

The good news is Marmoleum requires stores to be licensed dealers. That means the store who sent the installers is on the hook for the people that installed it. I would speak with the store's manager and have them come out and investigate this floor. It sounds like you will need plenty of repairs on this floor before you it will look the way it should.

Marmoleum will not be responsible for the product as this was installation error, but they MIGHT help by sending an inspector out to ensure that the product is not defective.

A-ha! You picked up on this and I didn’t even mention this one thing that happened. I came home at the very end of the install when they were installing the quarter round. They finished up and as they were packing up I walked around looking at the floor. I quickly found one spot where the planks joined where one side was MUCH higher than the other— the edge of the plank was sticking up. It was glaringly obvious, I couldn’t belive they hadn’t seen it.

It was pretty alarming, I thought they’d have to take the floor apart and redo it. So I got their attention before they left and he said oh I can take care of that, pulled out a mallet, and smashed the edge down so it was flush. He told me to do the same to any other edges that popped up. He bragged about it being a $30 mallet and how the one I could get from a store wouldn’t work so well.

This did NOT seem right to me at the time but I didn’t know for sure. I have installed plank vinyl myself before, but that was with a glue edge not click. (And by god did I do a good, careful job with it!)

So in your experience it sounds like the installer smashed the floor into place instead of clicking it??? Oh god what a shmuck. So he would have broken the “click” mechanism?

This is so helpful, thank you so much. I have had to listen to the salesperson tell me every few minutes over several hours how this is because of hydrostatic pressure and she warned me. I knew that was crap.

Yah. Sorry. This is installation error. Is the flooring store a licensed distributor of Marmoleum? I suggest you ask to speak with a manager because the sales person is speaking about one thing and ignoring the Pink Elephant in the room.

Hydrostatic pressure does NOT show up like this. And if your concrete slab is old (older than mid 1980's build) then why did they not TEST FOR IT???? Yah. As you can see the argument she is speaking about is actually digging her a deeper hole.

This is supposed to be a 25 year floor. With the expansion potential of fibreboard cores (marmoleum click will have the same expansion as a cork floating floor) won't last past the summer.

Right now your floor is experiencing the "shrinkage" time of the year. Winter heating systems cause DRY AIR. That dryness will shrink your floor (completely normal). That means the summer time is the opposite. Summer humidity will cause this floor to expand. I've seen cork floating floors expand as much as 1 INCH over 25 linear feet. That's why the expansion gap needs to be AT LEAST 1/2" at all walls!!!!!!

If your floors are too tight to the wall in winter, they are going to be ruined come summer time. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you go to the store manager to have this dealt with.