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Flooring living room Paint

Need cork flooring plus paint colour recommendations

5 years ago

Just bought our first condo (with my partner) and this is how current owners have the living space. Our furniture is lighter (beige) with darker table (wall mounted shelf under tv and tv staying). Need cork or carpet floors for noise reduction (bylaw- actually limited to carpet but hoping they allow cork - anyone have data we can present on noise cancelling ability vs carpet??). Thoughts on cork floor colour and paint colour to go with the brick? New at this. Thanks!!

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Comment (1)

SJ McCarthy
5 years ago
The condo board's requirements for noise reduction will be very important to find/view/have a copy on hand. Carpet is the ONLY product that cancels FOOT STEPS! And guess what noise gets the MOST complaints? Right. Foot steps. Sigh. You can see where they will go with this?

As a cork flooring professional, I tackled this on a DAILY basis. I always recommend STARTING with the Condo boards REQUIREMENTS and then challenging them with available data. This gets much easier if you have a health requirement that means you must ELIMINATE carpet. That way you can argue "undue hardship".

Anyway, onto the data. I recommend working with cork floating flooring (11mm or thicker) plus 6mm or 12mm cork underlayment. Yes. That means you will have an increase of 3/4" floor height. That's a serious step up from most carpet installs. The carpets I can see look like "low-nap". The padding underneath them is what does all the "acoustic work" when it comes to VOCAL NOISES (STC ratings).

Cork + cork will do NICELY for vocal noises (airborne sound = STC). What cork does not do (as) well with = foot steps. Hence the need to look at 12mm cork underlay (1/2"). In the USA, 70% of condos will accept 6mm cork underlay. The other 30% REQUIRE 1/2" and there is nothing you can do to make them change their mind.

So....first things first. Find samples of both floating floor AND cork underlayments. Ask for DELTA IIC ratings from the manufacturers of the cork products (NOT IIC/STC ratings...they are EASILY falsified).

https://www.icorkfloor.com/store/acoustic-underlay-12mm-cork/

https://www.greenbuildingsupply.com/core/media/media.nl?id=102754&c=772072&h=9829b186ca369be841f2&_xt=.pdf

Check out "page 10 of 12" in the second link...at the very bottom of the page you will see "Increase in Impact Isolation class = 22". This is the DELTA IIC rating for 12mm cork underlayment. This is the MOST PRECISE document I have ever found for cork. These are 'pure' numbers. They cannot be manipulated because the testing is SOOOOO regimented. They test used 8mm Pergo laminate which is rated as a "Zero" for noise reduction (it does NOTHING to keep noise down). All the "work" is being done by the cork.

The 12mm cork underlay offers 22 dB. An 11mm cork plank (by itself) will offer 8-10 dB. The two put together (and YES you are ALLOWED to ADD Delta IIC numbers...that's why they are SOOOOO important) you get 30- 32 dB worth of Impact noise reduction. That is MASSIVE. I can't tell you how MASSIVE that is.

A 6" concrete slab rates as 26-28 dB. An 8" concrete slab = 30-32 dB. By installing 1" worth of cork+cork product you have effectively added the equivalent of 8" of concrete! Whew! That's impressive.

If your proposal and PRESENTATION to the condo board are done properly, with lots of scientific "know-how" you can get the exemption done with the 1/2" cork underlay + cork flooring.

And if you have a health concern re: carpet, you are even farther down the path to cork flooring.
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