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Hardwood Flooring
Today’s hardwood flooring options offer homes and businesses more choices than ever before, from standards like oak, maple, birch to exotics like purpleheart. Flooring can be either pre-finished, with excellent extended warranties, or unfinished, to be finished on-site. Planks can be solid or “engineered,” with added stability and an extended range of use. Plank edges can be beveled, eased, micro-grooved, or square, each giving a specific “look” to the finished floor. Modern manufacturing assures us of uniformity, cost savings, and ease of installation. Not to mention the toughness of the new prefinished surfaces.
Although unfinished planks are available, prefinished are far more popular and economical. It would be very costly and time consuming, perhaps not even possible, to replicate a prefinished floor surface on-site. Manufacturers use as many as 10 or more coats, with special space-age additives for toughness, and cure them using Ultra-violet light. An on-site finished floor can take days to complete, minus the additives and UV curing, while a prefinished floor can be ready within a day.
Solid Hardwood
Solid plank flooring is also known as “strip” flooring because of the narrow widths of the planks (generally, 2 1/2" wide and 1' to 7' long). Because of its sensitivity to moisture, solid wood is not recommended for below ground-level or directly over concrete installation. Solid planks, typically 3/4" thick, are nailed or stapled to the subfloor and should have an underlayment installed beneath the planking. They can be sanded and refinished many times, but will lose that super-tough factory-applied finish in the process. However, under normal use, whether or not to refinish is an unlikely concern.
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Alloc • Lauzon
Quick-Step • BSL
Mohawk • Ancestral
Wecork • Teragren
APC Cork • Shaw
... & more!
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Engineered Hardwood
Engineered Planking
Engineered wood floors are generally 2 to 7 thin sheets of wood laminated together, with grains perpendicular to each other, to form one plank. Often, the top ply will be of an exotic species, giving a more luxurious and distinctive look at a fraction of what the exotic floor would cost if solid. Planks are thinner and lighter-weight than solid planks, range from 1/4" to 9/16" thick. They are from 2 1/4" to 7" wide, and are delivered in bundles of random-lengths ranging from 1' to 5'. The added dimensional stability arising from the cross-grained plies allows these floors to be installed both above and below-grade as they are not as moisture-sensitive as solid floors. Engineered floors can be nailed, stapled, glued, or floated over a wide variety of subfloors, including concrete and some existing flooring. Like solid floors, they should have an underlayment installed.
LongStrip Flooring
Longstrip planks are constructed by bonding layers of hardwood to a softwood core; like regular engineered planks, the layers’ grains are set perpendicular to each other for stability. The top hardwood layer is composed of numerous smaller “board”-like pieces; the planks are about 7 1/2" wide by 7' long. The result is a floor board that looks 3 rows wide and several planks long, but is really just one easy-to-install, easy-to-replace plank. A longstrip floor can be installed above- or below-grade, over concrete or an existing floor (maybe) and is designed to be stapled, glued, or floated. Underlayment recommended.
Underlayment
Like carpeting, wood floors benefit from use of an underlayment. Some types require it, some types come with it integrated into the planks. The underlayment accomplishes several things: acts as a moisture barrier (particularly over concrete or in below-grade installations), covers minor subfloor irregularities, provides some degree of sound insulation. Usually polyurethane sheeting is used, but cork is growing in popularity, particularly where noise reduction/sound-insulation is wanted. Be sure to check and follow the manufacturer’s recommendations for use and type of underlayment (warranties may hinge on this).
