Hardwood Floor Water Damage Repair in Calgary
Boards lifting or cupping at the edges mean water got underneath. Caught early, most of it can be saved. Left alone, it spreads into the boards next to it and into the subfloor.
What water does to an oak floor
Wood swells when it takes on moisture. Cupping is when the edges of each board rise higher than the middle, and it is the pattern you get from a slow leak, a dishwasher line, or water that came up from below. Crowning is the opposite, the centre standing proud, and it usually means somebody sanded the floor flat before it had finished drying. Both are the floor telling you there is a moisture problem that has to be solved before anything else happens.
The order matters more than most people are told. Find the water, stop it, dry the boards and the subfloor back to a normal moisture content, then refinish. Sanding a wet floor flat locks the problem in: as the wood gives up the rest of the water it shrinks, and the floor you paid to flatten comes back crowned or gapped. We meter the moisture and we will tell you to wait if waiting is the right call.
Calgary water damage is usually one of three things
The first is a plumbing failure upstairs, which is the most common by a distance and also the most saveable, because it is normally found within a day or two. The second is groundwater in a spring melt, which is what put water through hundreds of homes along the Bow and the Elbow in June 2013, hardest of all in Bowness. Communities on that flood plain still turn up floors that were dried in a hurry and never properly put back. The third is the quiet one: a humidifier left running hard against a dry winter, or ice damming at a door, wetting the same strip of floor a little every year until the finish fails there and nowhere else.
What can be saved comes down to how long the water sat. Boards caught early, dried slowly and only mildly cupped can usually be sanded flat and refinished with no sign anything happened. Boards that stayed wet long enough to blacken, rot or grow mould get cut out, replaced and blended into the refinish. If you can see the edges lifting, that is the point to have someone look, because this is the one job on this site where waiting reliably makes it more expensive.
Other work we cover
Have us look at your floors in person.