INSTALLATION Temp, fast-track installations in the pandemic era
Necessity: Mother of invention First, to my readers, I hope that you, your colleagues and all of your families are keeping well in these uncertain times. As I am writing this, I have started my second month staying and working at home. I could fill these pages with what it has been like to live and work in these circumstances, but I am well and so is my family. I wish the same for all of you! As this deadline approached, I asked our editor, Kerry Knudsen, how things are in Canada, overall, and found that it’s not too different from the U.S. and many other places in the world with the Covid-19 Pandemic having a dramatic impact, to say the Christopher least. Canada’s three largest provincCapobianco es have begun setting up temporary hospitals to expand their number of available beds in anticipation of an influx of patients. Joseph Brant Hospital in Burlington, west of Toronto, is building a modular structure that will contain 93 beds as a temporary pandemic unit to accommodate patients who need treatment. Moving forward, there is anticipation of the need for flooring in newly created spaces for medicine. Sure enough, Kerry had no sooner said that to me, and I received several inquiries in this vein from design professionals that often ask me for advice on floorcovering selection, installation and maintenance. These questions regarding temporary installations or installations in most unique circumstances are coming my way. The thought process brought me back to a 1992 project that I did in New York’s Central Park. A major carpet mill wanted to have a 12- by 100-foot piece of a new product they were coming out with installed at the finish line for a big “walkathon” to show how good this carpet was. The idea was, “thousands of people have walked across this carpet and it still looks new!” Pieces of the actual walkathon carpet were to be distributed to carpet retailers as an example of the product’s durability. The challenge for me was to install the carpet temporarily, without
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adhesive, in the middle of a roadway. All I could think about was how to put it down securely so there was no possibility of anybody tripping over it! I assembled a team to make the installation happen and really had to improvise. We had to forget about “by the book.” It was an interesting process, but we got it done. A lot of similar improvisation is happening today. With the demand for hospital space, many are dealing with converting existing spaces to hospital spaces and doing so in very short order. Some of these questions I’ve heard recently have been pretty unique. In one case, an emergency tent hospital with over 1,000 beds was being planned for an athletic field. The plan was to install heat welded sheet vinyl flooring over fire retardant plywood on top of wood sleepers over a sheet of polyurethane on grass athletic fields. They wanted my advice for the proper prep for this unusual condition. My advice was to make sure the polyurethane is as thick as possible to hopefully block moisture from the ground from affecting the plywood. No matter what, the plywood is going to react to moisture and will most likely expand. Even a slight expansion would cause the plywood seams to telegraph. I advised that they should be prepared for those seams be visible through the floor, even with careful preparation. Another concern is going over fire retardant plywood. This is not a recommended application because of the potential chemical reaction between the adhesive and the fire-retardant chemicals used to treat the plywood. I advised that the installation of a 9 mm (3/8”) layer of underlayment-grade plywood over the top would provide more stability to the entire system, less likelihood of joint telegraphing and a proper bonding surface for the vinyl. I was also asked twice recently about converting an existing space that had carpet installed to a space where resilient flooring would be installed for these hospital uses; one a college dormitory and the other administrative offices. In one case, they were planning to install a “floating” plywood substrate to protect the existing carpet and wanted to install resilient flooring over the top. The other one was even more interesting because of the questions. Can we keep the carpet? Can we cover carpet with a membrane — what kind, and how do we seal it? If we rip up carpet, what about the residual ad-
