Substrate Preparation
New Year | New Look | Same Quality Products
Since opening our doors in 1951, Dependable, LLC has continuously sought new ways to improve our products & our brand for the benefit of our customers. Because we have kept up with new technologies and customer demands, our high-quality products have become a staple throughout the flooring underlayment industry. In an effort to continue this…
Read MoreYour Floor Is Only As Good As Your Platform
While carpet and carpet pads hide a lot of deficiencies found in typical subfloors, things like wood, tile, and LVT/LVP flooring reflect those deficiencies: Uneven joints between planks, sheets and tiles; Floors with obvious slopes, bumps, ridges and/or rolls, etc. These deficiencies can quickly turn what was anticipated to be a beautiful LVP floor into…
Read MoreFlooring Won’t Stick To Gypsum?
Why Won’t It Stick? Many installers experience a huge problem when applying flooring on new or old gypsum substrates: their glue or patch just won’t stick to the slab. More often than not, this is attributed to gypsum lacking the integrity to accept many floor coverings. Thankfully, there is a simple method for making gyspum…
Read MoreSpecial Announcement – “The Weatherhead 100” 2019
We are pleased to announce that not one, but TWO companies within the Keene Family have been selected as winners of “The Weatherhead 100” for 2019: Keene Building Products Dependable, LLC Established in 1988, “The Weatherhead 100” awards are the premier celebration of Northeast Ohio’s spirit of entrepreneurship and the companies leading the way in Northeast…
Read More“Vapor Barriers: Nuisance or Necessity?”
In recent weeks we here at Dependable had Peter Craig, a renowned concrete floor specialist come in and educate the team on moisture mitigation. We hear a lot about the issue and what a serious costly concern it is in the industry. Over the next few months we will be sharing articles from Peter Craig…
Read More“Underlayments solve many problems”
“There doesn’t appear to be an industry definition for the category of “underlayments,” but this grouping can easily include products such as backer board, liquid and sheet membranes, uncoupling membranes, mortar beds, patching compounds and self-leveling products. No matter which products are being used on a project, the floor or wall surface must be flattened…
Read More“Subfloor Preparation Problems, Part 1: Asbestos, Cutback and Moisture Concerns
“Subfloor preparation is quite possibly the most important step – the foundational, starting step –of any installation, yet it’s also often performed incorrectly or not done at all. As we here at FCI hear time and time again, “The flooring is only as good as what’s beneath it,” and that extends to the subfloor and how it…
Read More“Q&As: Janka Explained, Self-Leveling Underlayment, & Testing Slabs”
“…Can I pour a self-leveling underlayment over an existing ceramic floor and then glue down a wood floor over it?” “…Yes, there are new products on the market today that can be poured directly over just about any type of subfloor, including rubber, VCT, vinyl, ceramic, cut-back adhesive, gypsum concrete, plywood, OSB and more.…
Read More“Reflecting on FCI and the Industry”
“I began installing in 1976. I started in carpet, then when the economy slowed in the ‘80s, I decided to expand into other flooring categories. I went to as many training seminars as I could, and on-the-job training for tile, hardwood, and resilient vinyl. I remember when Floor Covering Installer first came out and thought,…
Read More“Underlayments — So Many Choices”
“The extremely fast-paced schedules of today’s jobsites demand products that can fix floor surfaces quickly, efficiently and in a cost-effective fashion. These surface coatings are sometimes called on to correct extreme variations in plane — while drying quickly and ready to receive tile in short order. Self-levelers or SLUs, as they are known, meet these…
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