ᐅ Uneven hardwood floor causing difficulties with baseboard installation

Hello everyone,

At the beginning of the year, we renovated an apartment and had a professional tradesman install solid wood plank flooring. The screed was fully leveled by the installer before the planks were glued down, to create a smooth subfloor. Now that we have finally started working on the baseboards, we noticed that the floor shows significant unevenness in some areas. As a result, the baseboards cannot be mounted flush and without tension using the clip system. Photos can be seen here:

Are these deviations normal within typical tolerances, or could this indicate a workmanship defect?

Wood expands and contracts, especially now that the weather is warm. I just looked at my baseboards. They are as warped as yours. Completely normal, I also have dents. Eventually, you stop noticing it.

Well, you always see this kind of deviation, and it always looks terrible. That’s not how wood should be installed. The right side looks perfectly straight.
If you’re going to level, do it properly. You can only correct this to a limited extent by bending the baseboards. But you won’t get more than about 1cm (0.4 inches). Talk to the floor installer. Pulling it up is not an option.

Is it just this one spot?

Thank you for the responses. So far, only one spot is this extreme. However, in several other spots the expansion joint is too wide, so the baseboard does not cover the gap and we had to use wood filler to fix it. I didn’t expect a professional floor installer to work so imprecisely...

@zelmani
How wide is your molding, and did you specify that to the flooring installer in the contract? Next time, use spray cork instead of wood filler. It remains permanently flexible.

Does the floor only slope towards the sides? In that case, the screed might also be concave.