Armstrong Flooring will not honor manufacturer warranty on a defective
laminate flooring product. Said product was actually discontinued due to
known defects.
A Local Carpet One franchise was hired to install an Armstrong laminate
hardwood floor in 2001. The floor was designed to be installed by sliding
planks into place in a tongue-in-groove fashion and gluing together
(different from the current locking laminate products). After one week of
product "acclimation" and then installation, there were problems. In a small
number of places, some seams began to rise, creating small ridges where the
floor pieces joined. In other areas, some adjacent to the peaks, the planks
separated by up to 1-8". In three places, Planks did not properly fit at
corners, resulting in sharp points.

Honoring product and installation warranties, within 6 months of the
installation Carpet One sent an installer to repair the floor three times.
For every correction made, however, a new issue presented another area. The
result was less than perfect, but still for the better. I wrote the floor
off as being a little higher maintenance than planned.

This year, I hired the same franchise to install more flooring, including
Armstrong vinyl. The installer, who was a certified by Armstrong for
laminate installation, immediately recognized the floor as a glue-together
product that was defective. The installer alerted a Carpet One sales rep,
and the company sent a sales representative to look at my floor. The floor
was defective and needed repair or replacement, in his opinion as well.

A claim was filed with Armstrong via Carpet One in October, and Armstrong
sent one of their distributor reps to my house to examine the problems. She
immediately decided that each of my problems "must" be related to bad
installation or uneven subfloor, without thorough investigation other than a
moisture reading. Armstrong denied the claim per the rep's claims of
moisture and uneven subflooring. 1) Moisture: Armstrong determined the
flooring contained some excess moisture. This is a climate controlled,
humidity-controlled home built on a crawlspace in which the ground is
covered in plastic and lime. The floor was found to contain some excess
moisture, but the areas she tested were not even the defective areas,
moisture causes expansion and not separation, and she based her findings on
current product standards (the current products are moisture resistant on
all sides and not held together by liquid glue -- of course they will retain
less moisture). Also, between my subfloor and laminate floor lies
Armstrong's own moisture barrier underlayment...so if moisture is coming up
from under the house, they provided defective underlayment. 2) Uneven
subflooring: My home has some uneven subflooring, but actually not in the
areas in which the defects are occurring. No mention in the claim denial was
made of plank separation...and neither moisture nor uneven subflooring can
possibly be accountable for that issue.

Additionally, I continuously had to remind Armstrong's distributor rep while
inspecting my floor that my floor was a glue-together installation, not
interlocking. Even at the end of her "assessment" she claimed separation
would be "due to bad installation since the pieces are made to lock
together"...she had absolutely no idea the glue-together flooring was not
designed to interlock!

An independent inspector recently invalidated the distributor
representative's reasons for denying the claim, but Armstrong was quick to
decide afterward that it would then be the fault of the installer. An actual
Armstrong employee has never come to see the floor.

Armstrong and Carpet One have both acknowledged known problems with
Armstrong glue-together laminate flooring significant enough for them to
discontinue them shortly after my purchase, and the interlocking products
are designed so problems such as mine do not occur.

It's not my fault I purchased a floor that had been poorly
engineered-designed at the time of purchase. Factory warranty on the floor
is 20 years. To date, they refuse to even repair even a few of the most
apparent defects. Armstrong advised on 12-14-05 installer confirmed that
problem is not manufacturer's defect. I have confirmed this statement is not
truthful. Installer believes sales representative who inspected the floor
was not knowledgeable of the product and biased toward Armstrong's interests
because she is with a company affiliated with Armstrong.