Choosing the Right Hardwood Floor for your Home.

Hardwood flooring is divided into categories that makes it an easy choice for your needs

By Gloria Brown

Buying a hardwood floor is an important investment. Before you invest, you should ensure that the floor you choose meets your needs perfectly. It’s important to choose your flooring with care. You can’t change it as easily as you can rearrange your furniture – you should be thinking long-term for this once-in-a-lifetime purchase!

Among the wide array of possible floor coverings, hardwood provides some incomparable qualities. It’s natural, environmentally friendly, attractive, warm and easy to maintain – giving any home’s decor a rich and distinctive feel while increasing resale value. Hardwood flooring also helps create a healthy home environment by eliminating the allergens associated with dust-trapping carpet.

Hardwood flooring is the easy choice for your needs – it’s suitable for most every application and environment. Hardwood flooring is divided into broad categories by manufacturing methods. There are three types of hardwood; choose the one that’s right for you.

Solid Hardwood - These are boards made entirely of hardwood, generally 3/4" (19 mm) thick. Unfinished hardwood comes as plain unfinished boards. After installation, a specialist sands the wood and then applies stain and three or four coats of varnish. Finish applied on-site like this does not resist wear nearly as well as a factory-applied finish (as is found on prefinished wood). Guarantees on this type of hardwood cover only installation and exclude wear and tear.

Prefinished solid hardwood is pre-sanded, stained and finished with factory-applied protection. It is prepared in a controlled and ideal environment. This type of flooring is installation-ready. Installation is fast and easy, without the offensive varnish odors that occur when finishing is done on-site in the home. You won’t have to leave the house during installation and you’ll be able to return your furniture to its normal position very shortly after installation.

Engineered Hardwood - A technological masterpiece, this hardwood combines a real wood surface with a solid plywood base. Created for environments with varying humidity, engineered flooring is more stable than solid hardwood flooring. Boards can be glued directly to concrete (even with a radiant heating system) or on an acoustic membrane. They can also be stapled to a plywood subfloor. This type of flooring is ideal for condominiums, basements, or commercial use.

There are four criteria to evaluate the quality of engineered flooring: the thickness of the hardwood layer; the number of plywood plies (layers); the cutting process used for the hardwood surface; and the precision of the cut for the base layers. The hardwood layer, or “wear layer”, must have a minimal thickness of 5/32" (4 mm) to allow sanding as needed, similar to solid hardwood. The plywood must have at least five plies to ensure good floor stability.

Glueless Engineered Hardwood - This kind of flooring combines the beauty of hardwood with a number of environmental and economic advantages. The boards are made of a high-density fiber (HDF) base whose engineered edges fit together perfectly with a simple motion.

This flooring does not require glue, nails or staples – hence the common term “floating floor.” This environmentally friendly product contains recycled content and can be removed from one room and re-installed in another room or building – making it a reusable resource and sound ecological choice. Some floating floors are only laminated panels covered in a printed wood pattern, protected by a plastic polymer coating.

After you have analyzed all your options and decided on the type of hardwood that you want, the process isn’t finished. There are still many choices to make: the color of the floor, the width of the boards, and the shine of the finish. These all depend on your taste and the look you desire... things that deserve careful consideration. An installed floor will last for decades upon decades – choose wisely.

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