Naples woman’s flooring saga illustrates remodeling pitfalls

NAPLES, Fla. – A Naples woman whose floors started to come unglued made a Call for Action.

Jane, a retired flight attendant who asked us to use only her first name, decided to replace her carpet with engineered bamboo flooring in 2013. She paid $2,709.74 and loved the result.

“It looked great,” she said. “I was very pleased. I loved it.”

But after one year, her flooring did not look right, she said.

“There were little tiny things, you know,” she recalled. “At first — what is on my floor? Thinking it’s fuzz or something. And I’m like, ‘What’s going on with the surface of this floor?’ And it’s all right at the entry way. And then it started to get worse.”

It would have cost $3,000 to $4,000 for Jane to replace the flooring.

“I’m a single woman, not a Naples millionaire.”

In May 2015, she started making call after call to the flooring company she hired for the job, Bailey Floors Company on 5760 Youngquist Road Unit 7 in south Fort Myers.

Twenty months later, Jane hadn’t gotten a resolution, she said. So, she called WINK News Call for Action for help.

The issue was with glue manufacturer, according to Bailey Floors owner John Bailey, who spoke with WINK News. Bailey had been working for months with Fontana, California-based W.F. Taylor LLC to replace Jane’s floor, he said.

WINK News reached out to the glue manufacturer W.F. Taylor and was sent an inspection report by an independent professional who concluded that the issue was caused by elevated moisture. The inspection found no manufacturing deficiencies in the glue or the flooring, W.F. Taylor said.

W.F. Taylor nonetheless agreed to work with Bailey Floors and Jane to replace her flooring for free.

“Regardless of those facts, if Taylor adhesives have been a component in a customer’s flooring installation, we want that customer to be satisfied,” said Allan Preyer, vice president of Commercial Activities for W.F. Taylor.

Preyer, in his statement to WINK News, included tips for anyone else thinking about getting new flooring. Successful installation a wood floor on a concrete sub-floor requires these steps, Preyer said:

• Testing for the moisture level present in the concrete slab.
• Leveling, patching and moisture-treating the concrete slab if necessary.
• The selection of adhesive and flooring that can withstand the moisture present in the slab.
• The proper installation of the flooring and adhesive and performance of the flooring and adhesive over time.

Preyer’s full statement is below:

This is the letter Bailey sent to Jane: