Buckling flooring

[Louloutulip]

Hello. I noticed my floor in both bedrooms is buckling. (No idea what buckling was until today). I honestly never noticed this until now so not sure if it’s an over night phenomenon or if it takes time to occur. I have added the floor plan of where it’s happening a a photo of it too.

any help on what I do about this/ prevent worsening will be appreciated.

We had this and it became a tripping hazard. The wood had been laid in the “wrong” direction leaving no space for the small movements of swell/shrink that wood needs. I’m probably not using the right terminology there, but basically laid in short horizontal strips vs longer verticals if that makes sense.

I've had this too with an oak floor - It was a builder who had done our extension. I re-contacted him and he came back and took one side skirting board off and trimmed and refitted the very edge one to give it more space. It was the same as pp who said there was no room for its natural swell.

Had exact same thing with our engineered wood floor, builder came back took a slither off the edge by the wall, put the skirting back on all sorted no problems 10+ years later

Yep, as others have said, probably not enough of an expansion gap. See that little wood colour edge strip against your skirting board? Take that off and you should see a gap between the flooring and the skirting. If there's no gap that what's causing the buckling, so either the flooring or the skirting needs to be shaved, which you can do with a multi tool quite easily. Then stick the edge strip back down, covering the gap.

Presumably a leak in your bathroom?

We had this in the kitchen after the dishwasher leaked, and moved the kitchen island to squash it back down!

Amazingly this worked, it was quite thick wood though, if it's laminate it will kind of flake off rather than bend.

Thank you everyone. However the flooring was put down around 15 years ago. I only noticed it today and have lived in the properly for a year and walk on that ground all the time!

Has your heating been on a lot more recently? If you've only been there a year could this be the first time you've had it warm enough to start expanding? Previous owners may have just ignored it?

Yes we have had it on a lot more than previously!

I reckon that's it then. You could try turning the heating off/down and seeing if it settles down again. Chilly experiment though! I reckon previous owners must have just ignored it or not realised it's a fairly easy fix.