Port Moody · About 30 minutes from Maple Ridge

Flooring installation in Port Moody

Port Moody packs very different housing into a small city: towers, mid-rises and townhomes through Klahanie, Newport Village and Suter Brook, family homes up Heritage Mountain and around Glenayre and College Park, and older houses in Moody Centre.

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That means the right floor can change from one street to the next. In a strata, the building's sound bylaw usually decides the underlay before anyone picks a colour. On the hillsides it's mostly busy family main floors, where engineered flooring, vinyl plank and laminate are all in the running. Close to the water, humidity is part of the plan for anything with wood in it, which includes engineered flooring and the wood-fibre core of laminate.

Strata sound rules come first

Many stratas limit how much footstep noise a hard floor can pass to the unit below, usually as a minimum IIC rating (impact sound), sometimes with an STC rating (airborne sound, like voices) as well. The rating belongs to the whole assembly: the floor, the underlay and the structure under them. Sound travels more easily through a wood-frame building than through concrete, so in wood-frame mid-rises and townhomes the underlay counts for more. Check your bylaws, send the strata the underlay's tested rating, and have the approval in writing before the old floor comes out.

Engineered flooring near the inlet

Homes by the water can run more humid than those further up the hill, especially through the wet months. Engineered flooring copes with that better than solid wood would, because its real-wood top layer sits on a cross-layered core that resists swelling and shrinking. It still moves a little, which is why the manufacturer's acclimation steps and the gap left at every wall matter, and matter more in a humid house. Most engineered products list an indoor humidity range to stay within, often around 35 to 55 per cent. An inexpensive hygrometer tells you where your house sits.

Old fir in Moody Centre

Some older houses in Moody Centre have original fir under the carpet: narrow, tight-grained boards that are hard to find today. Decide what you want for it before choosing a new floor. A floating floor sits on underlay with no nails or glue, so the fir stays underneath, untouched, for a future owner. If you'd rather bring the fir back, that's a sanding and refinishing job, and WoodPro does that work too. Fir is softer than oak, and some of these floors have been sanded before, so how much wood is left above the tongue decides what's possible. That's worth checking before you choose between the two.

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