Port Coquitlam · About 20 minutes from Maple Ridge

Flooring installation in Port Coquitlam

Port Coquitlam is mostly detached family houses, and a lot of them have a rental suite downstairs. That gives many PoCo jobs two briefs under one roof: the owners' floor upstairs, and a suite floor that has to be waterproof, hard-wearing and easy to fix between tenants.

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The suite floor usually sits on concrete, and that decides more about it than the colour does. Before choosing anything for a basement, the slab should be checked for moisture, because the result rules some materials in and others out.

Upstairs, it's the usual family main floor: kids, dogs and a back door that opens onto the yard. Waterproof laminate and vinyl plank are both built for that kind of traffic.

A suite floor built for turnover

For a suite, the aim is a floor you never have to think about. Rigid-core vinyl plank handles water and heavy use. Compare the wear layer, measured in mils, rather than the total thickness: it does the most to decide how the floor looks after a few tenancies. 12 mil is a sensible minimum for a rental, and 20 mil is tougher still. Stone-look vinyl tile suits the suite bathroom and entry. Keep a box of spare planks in storage. A damaged plank can often be swapped out as a repair, but only if a matching one still exists.

Slabs with no vapour barrier

Many older PoCo basements were poured with no plastic sheet under the concrete, so moisture moves up through the slab all year. You can't see it, but a floor that traps it will show it: glue lets go, wood-based cores swell, and mould grows where nobody looks. A simple first check is a square of plastic taped tight to the slab for a day or two; if it's damp underneath, take that seriously. The flooring's instructions say which test and which limit actually apply. On a damp slab, anything glued down or wood-based, laminate and engineered included, is a poor bet. Floating vinyl over a vapour barrier underlay is the usual answer.

The lowest floor near the river

Parts of lower Riverwood sit close to the Coquitlam River flood plain. No floor makes a flood harmless, but some come through a wet event far better than others. On the lowest level here, the sensible choice is waterproof vinyl plank or vinyl tile floating over the slab. It won't swell from a leak or a damp season, and if water gets underneath, a click floor can usually be lifted so the concrete can dry, rather than scraped off the way a glued floor would be.

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