I've seen some concerns over Shaw flooring on Houzz, and wanted to post an update for anyone who may be researching products or experiencing the same problem we had.

After looking at dozens options from almost every major manufacturer, we installed a whole house worth of Shaw HDR MXL Plus in "Hygge" which we thought was the perfect neutral oak color, ultra-realistic grain pattern and embossing, and the specs we were looking for regarding thickness, wear layer, etc. This was in early 2022.

Shortly after install, we noticed major problems. There was what can only be described as "cracking" across the surface of some of the boards. We continued to notice more and more boards that had this same cracking problem, and ultimately ended up finding hundreds of problem-pieces throughout the entire house.

Additionally, many of the end joints of the boards themselves were uneven, not staying together, flexing, and cracking. When we vacuumed the floors with a lighted vacuum (low angle light) it was painfully obvious that nearly the entire floor had one of these two problems.

We raised the issue with the retailer, who discussed with their Shaw rep, and we ended up filing a warranty claim. Shaw requested and Independent Flooring Inspection, and scheduled an inspector to come to our home a few weeks after that. The inspector did a very thorough inspection and report on the floors, which he sent to the retailer and Shaw rep.

After a little discussion with the retailer, they ended up approving a whole-house replacement and yesterday finished redoing the job with a perfect result. I think the new product is improved over the stuff we bought last year, the embossed texture is a little more realistic (I think?), the ends are all perfectly connected, and no cracking issues.

Nobody would say so, but I believe Shaw must be aware of this defect, which might explain their willingness to address our case. I had seen a few photos on Houzz of similar problems. It does appear that they've fixed the product (or maybe our early stuff was just a bad batch?).

Another side note, we originally waited 7 months for the product to arrive, and were told at the time that Shaw had rejected the entire batch of product from the factory because of quality control problems. I wondered after the fact if the material we got was somehow a holdover from whatever QC concerns the manufacturer had at the time.

Now that we're done I'm thrilled with the product, thrilled with the end result, and really relieved we decided to go with a big, reputable manufacturer with a good warranty. I was sure this problem was going to devolve into us hiring attorneys to make the retailer and/or manufacturer take responsibility for this big of a problem, but everybody handled it perfectly and reasonably in my opinion.

Photos of cracking, end separation, and finished result: