Products

There are many different types of hardwood floors.

 

-Solid: It is manufactured from several species and three styles: strips, planks, or random-width planks. Availalbe in various sizes from 3 to 6 or more inches wide. All solid hardwood is nailed down as opposed to glued down.

 

-Engineered: It is made of wood, but it's not solid. Instead, it is a laminated product like plywood, with a thin but tough veneer of real wood on top. That portion is laminated with three to five layers of less expensive wood and then bonded under pressure with strong glues.

 

-Bamboo: Becoming increasingly trendy, this environmentally friendly flooring gives a unique design element to your home, making it very attractive. It is extremely hard and stronger than other hardwood floors and is also dimensionally stable and moisture resistant. One great advantage of bamboo is that it is highly resilient and can take a greater impact than most hardwoods without denting.

 

-Laminate: By far, the most popular installations are of laminates that imitate wood. Besides being almost half the cost of other wood floorings, laminate is easy to install with most of the products simply snapping together. The planks float on a layer of plastic foam underlayment with the floor being held down around the edges by a baseboard or shoe molding. Durability is one advantage of laminate flooring, with the melamine finish being hard, resistant to dirt, and requiring only periodic damp mopping.

 

The species you choose will depend greatly on the style of your room and the range of your budget.

 

-Maple & Birch: Each contains the color white with light brown grain lines. The wood is incredibly smooth due to the pores being closed.

 

-Oak: It is a light brown wood with dark grain lines and open pores. It comes in two types, red oak and white oak.

 

-Ash: Similar to oak, but whiter, it is close grained and tough. It's overall strength is excellent and it has great shock resistance.

 

-Walnut & Cherry: Walnut is brown with open pores and finishes easily. It usually lightens over the years. Cherry is a lighter reddish brown with closed pores. In contrast, it's color deepens throughout the years. Both are very expensive and are usually custom-ordered.