Cork Flooring Underlayment: 4 Benefits

Many types of flooring materials require a floor underlayment material, and cork is an excellent one for many reasons. Additionally, cork floor underlayment can have many positive benefits of its own, many of which may solve your home's problems. What follows should explain the different types of cork flooring underlayment, and the advantages cork flooring underlayment can provide your home.

1. Sound Reduction

Cork flooring underlayment is excellent at soundproofing. It can absorb a great deal of sound, preventing it from exiting and entering the room where it is installed. Additionally, it is soft and will reduce the amount of noise a floor makes as people walk on it.

In fact, cork flooring underlayment is the best type of flooring underlayment for soundproofing. If you are installing flooring underlayment for the purposes of reducing sound, either to prevent the sounds of your footsteps from entering the floors below you, or to reduce the amount of sound entering your rooms through your floor, you should choose cork as your floor underlayment material.

2. Subfloor Raising

Flooring underlayment can be used to raise a subfloor. If you decide to install one flooring material over a large area, replacing two flooring materials, this can be very important. Using flooring underlayment in this way can raise the section of subfloor that is lower to be even with the higher section. Once this is complete, the surface material can be installed without a gap or drop in its height. This is both a functional and aesthetic improvement that would not be possible without flooring underlayment.

3. Floor Improvement

Sometimes, the surface material a floor is built from can contain minor problems or irregularities. Using a floor underlayment such as solid cork can do a great deal to de-emphasize the irregularities in a floor.

4. Thicknesses

The main difference between types of cork flooring underlayment is thickness. Cork flooring underlayment comes in sheets and rolls, but this has a minimal effect on any of the goals of cork flooring underlayment. In contrast, the thickness of your cork flooring underlayment will have a noticeable impact on its function, so you should consider why you are installing cork flooring underlayment and figure out which of the possible thicknesses serves your purposes the best.

Generally speaking, most solid cork floor underlayment will measure between very thin up to 1/2 inch. However, thicker versions may be available. Thicker cork flooring will do more to absorb sounds, both general sounds from the room they are in to the outside, as well as the sound of impacts on the floor such as walking to the floors below. However, there is effectively no difference between solid cork floor underlayment of 1/2 inch thickness or greater in this regard.

Thicker cork underlayment will change the height of the subfloor more than thinner cork underlayment.

Different thicknesses of cork underlayment will not change the feeling of your floor, whether you use your cork underlayment with engineered wood, laminate, or a different surface material.