Added benefits of Wood Flooring
Strong wood flooring will final additional than one hundred years, and the finish can be simply renewed when needed. Just getting wood floors increases the worth of your residence.
Not as well extended ago, the only choice you had was the old-fashioned solid wood tongue and groove strips in maple or oak. Nowadays, wood flooring can be planks from old barns, exotic woods, pre-finished engineered wood strips which eradicate the dust and disruption of finishing on site. You even can have wood laminate flooring, which isn’t wood, but looks like wood at a much lower price.
Strong WOOD FLOORING – Solid wood floors, even though gorgeous, can not be utilised everywhere. They have to be nailed to a sub-floor. This tends to make solid wood unsuitable for use directly more than concrete.
Adding a sub-floor in between the concrete and the wood flooring could possibly result in a height dilemma where the floor meets an adjoining space. Moisture causes wood to expand, so it’s not proper in basements. Humidity can lead to squeaking and buckling.
The trend appears to be for home owners to get wood flooring with a factory-applied finish. This eliminates dust from sanding, fumes from finishing, and waiting just before the floor can be walked on. Another benefit is that the factory finishes are normally a lot tougher than the polyurethane applied in the field.
The downside of pre-finishing is that given that that floor doesn’t get sanded right after it is installed, there are slight bumps and dips where the sub-floor is not perfectly level, and where the flooring strips could differ slightly in thickness.
To hide these misalignments, flooring is out there with V grooves so that when with each other, the edges are not touching and it’s complicated to notice any imperfections in alignment. Over time, these V grooves will catch dirt and darken, becoming a prominent function in the floor. Not my favorite situation.
An additional benefit of finishing soon after installation is that you can have the floor stained to your liking. If you like the grain of oak, but never care for the yellowish tone of the wood, you can make it amber, for instance. A skilled finisher will know how to bring out the all-natural patina of the wood working with boiled linseed oil or tung oil.
Most homeowners have hardwood flooring. There are also softwoods, like pine and fir, which are quite eye-catching. These will get nicked up more than time, but they’re meant to be lived on. The much more beat up they get, the superior they appear – in particular if you have a nation or antique flavor operating through the home. These work especially well as wider planks rather than the two 1/2″ strips.
Prices for strong wood flooring vary from $8 to $10 per square foot for widespread species, to more than $25 per square foot for the exotic assortment. This identical value variety applies to engineered wood flooring.
ENGINEERED WOOD FLOORING – The advantage of utilizing engineered wood flooring is that it can be employed straight over concrete (mainly because you don’t have to nail it during installation), or under grade (simply because moisture doesn’t bother it as considerably as strong wood). The wood appear comes from a thin veneer of the selected wood, which is pressed onto quite a few layers of substrate.
This solution is available in strips, planks, or panels that appear like planks. It can be nailed down, but is commonly installed as a floating floor. This suggests the pieces are glued to every other, but not attached to a sub-floor. This allows the floor to “float” with seasonal weather adjustments or adjustments in humidity.
Practically all engineered wood flooring is pre-finished, and usually comes with the V grooves pointed out earlier. Some can’t be refinished simply because that top rated veneer is too thin. Other individuals can be – when or twice. It depends on the top layer, which can be something from 1/12″ to 1/4″ depending on the manufacturer. In the end, this flooring costs about as a lot as solid wood flooring, and the only benefit (in my opinion) is that you can “float” it on concrete.
EXOTIC WOODS – Over the previous various years, quite a few flooring manufacturers have integrated exotic woods in their lines to meet growing recognition. Some of these exotic appears are even offered in wood laminate flooring. In strong planking, exotic woods can cost twice as considerably as comparable domestic species, even though engineered woods stay closer to the domestic hardwoods.
The appeal of these species is normally in their wealthy colors and their durability. Several are considerably harder than oak or maple. A quantity of tropical woods have been acclaimed as environmentally friendly due to their quick growth rate. The quickest self-replenishers are bamboo and cork (neither are a wood).
If the atmosphere is of concern to you, look for the FSC stamp on the item you happen to be acquiring. The Forest Stewardship Council is an environmental group that tracks wood production and certifies woods that are harvested in an environmentally friendly manner.
RECLAIMED WOOD FLOORING – This is yet another way to recycle. Herringbone flooring is not new wood that is made to appear old. Reclaimed wood really is old. These antique floor boards come from many sources. It could possibly be flooring removed from an old constructing or you could get old timbers that are sliced into floor boards.