Stage 1: Beautiful hardwood flooring is installed in your basement. Alternatively, a wooden subfloor is laid down in your basement and you splurge for expensive, soft, thick carpeting to be laid on top of it. Your floor is attractive and your basement is a little muggy, but mostly comfortable, although the floor seems cold. You add beautiful new furniture to your room.

Stage 2: You begin to notice a smell in the basement and begin to put carpet freshener down to try to mask the smell. Little spots of mildew eventually show at the bottom of furniture, but you don’t worry about them. It’s still muggy, but you love your new room so much that you try to ignore it.

Stage 3: You’ve given up trying to mask the smell in the basement. The floors have begun to buckle, and you move your nice furniture out of the basement, trading it for older things that aren’t as nice so your best furniture won’t get moldy. You still like having the space, and you go down there from time to time, but it’s not a nice place to be anymore.

Stage 4: You give up. The basement smells and you find that you have breathing problems there when you’re down there. The carpet smells bad, and the floorboards are rotting and buckling. Mold grows on everything you try to store there. At great personal expense, you pay to have the flooring and once beautiful carpet torn up and removed. It’s time to start again.

The problems with wood and organic carpeting in a basement only start there. Here’s some of the other things you can look forward to:

• Mold spores in the air causing health problems such as allergic reactions
• Fecal material from dust mites in the air affecting your health as you breathe
• Eventual loss of the basement as a useful living space or storage area
• Mold spreading to walls
• Insects like termites, sow bugs and beetles living under the carpet
• Rodents and other pests

The bottom line: wooden flooring in a basement is vulnerable to moisture and not a good idea.

What if you have your basement waterproofed? You can have the full perimeter of your basement guarded with a product like the WaterGuard Basement Waterproofing System and a sump pump, but this can’t keep all moisture out of your basement. If you have concrete floors and walls in your basement, then this porous concrete is sponging water from the moist earth outside of your basement into your basement. Once the vapor reaches the surface of the concrete, the air pulls it out, much in the same way the soil in a potted plant may be heavy with water but look dry on the surface. If you place carpet, wooden subflooring, cardboard boxes, drywall or anything else with organic material on or against these cement walls, moisture will collect there and create an environment for mold. Additionally, your home is filled with washing machine hoses that can burst, a water heater that can leak or fail and a countless number of other pipes to your tubs, toilets, dishwasher, refrigerator, shower, sinks, etc. that can leak, burst and overflow. That water is going to run downhill to your basement. You might not be home when this happens, and if it soaks into your wooden floors, mold can begin to grow in 24-48 hours- well before your floor can dry out.

Some hardware stores have been providing their customers with a chipboard subfloor with a dimpled plastic material secured on the bottom. This product just makes the problem worse- the wood still gets wet, and once the plastic dimples fill with water, they seal to the floor and are difficult to remove when you need to tear the moldy wood flooring out and remove it.

The answer to keeping your basement warm, dry and mold-free is Basement System’s Mill Creek Flooring. Completely waterproof, its unique honeycomb design and waterproof vinyl design will never rot, support mold growth, become the home for termites, or expand and buckle when wet. It comes with a 20-year warranty against water, it comes in attractive rosewood, natural oak and red mahogany designs. It has a warm, comfortable look, a fade-resistant UV coating and an anti-slip surface and is compatible with a radiant heated basement floors up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. It installs on top of your floor without adhesive, so it can be used immediately after installation.

Basement System’s products come with a free estimate and 86-page book. A skilled and fully trained technician can come to your house and tell you more about these products and help you make a strong, educated decision about the best choice for your basement flooring.