Wood Flooring-- Whatever You Need To Know.
The elegant look of a hardwood flooring can add warmth and character to any room in a home. The natural qualities of wood include depth and a visual look that many other types of floors try to duplicate. With the need for hardwood floor covering growing manufacturer's are improving their varieties to satisfy this need, with better quality surfaces and superior building and key plumbing knowledge construction techniques.
Hardwood floors come in a variety of wood types, colours and widths. Besides the traditional hardwoods (like red oak, white oak, maple and ash) many makers now provide unique wood types from all over the World. Unique woods give homeowners the opportunity to much better express their own personal decorating tastes with a more unique looking floor. With so many different types of wood floor covering now available it is sometime difficult to option which is finest suited to you.
Different Types of Wood Flooring
Solid wood floors are one solid piece of wood that have tongue and groove sides and be available in either pre-finished or incomplete designs. Solid wood floorings are delicate to wetness and it is not recommended to install these floorings listed below ground level, or directly over a concrete piece. These floorings are for nail-down setups only. You can refinish, or recoat solid wood floorings several times, which contributes to their appeal and to their long life. There are strong floors that are over 100 years old and are still in excellent condition.
All solid wood floors will respond to the existence of moisture. In the winter season heating months, moisture leaves the wood triggering the flooring to agreement which leaves unpleasant gaps in between each slab. In the summertime when the humidity is greater the wood will expand and the spaces will vanish. If there is excessive wetness it may cause the wood planks to cup, or buckle. This is why it is essential when installing a strong strip floor to leave the proper growth location around the border and to season the wood prior to installation.
Engineered wood floors-- These floorings are built from several wood plies that are glued together. The centre core is typically a softer wood product and is utilized to make the tongue and groove. A hardwood finish layer is glued on top of the centre core and another softer wood ply is attached underneath the core. This leading ply is also called the surface layer and can be constructed of almost any wood specie.
Wood always wishes to expand in a particular direction. In the presence of wetness strong wood slabs will constantly expand across the width of the slabs, instead of down the length of the boards. To avoid this problem, makers of engineered slabs place each ply in the opposite direction of each other. This is called cross-ply building and construction. Once the wood layers are glued together the plies will counteract each other which will stop the plank from growing or shrinking with changes in the humidity. Engineered wood floors are created for the drifting installation and can be glued together or some now featured a click system.
Veneer wood floors are very similar to laminate floorings. The only difference is that with a veneer floor covering to leading wear layer is a thin piece or genuine hardwood instead of a photographic image as in laminates. Veneer flooring is generally around 8mm in thickness with the leading wood layer being around 0.7 mm. Advantages of a veneer floors are that they are fast and easy to install and you have a real wood floor.
Most factory finished hardwood floors have a number of coats of finish applied to the wood's surface area. As example, numerous wood floor business are applying 6-10 coats of a ultra-violet (UV) treated urethane. This would be very challenging for someone to duplicate on a task website finish, not to discuss the number of days it would take. This is one of the reasons why numerous flooring mechanics, flooring retailers, and builders are pressing pre-finished wood floorings. Instead of taking numerous days to install and finish a brand-new hardwood flooring a pre-finished hardwood floor is generally performed in one day.
The Preparing Pipes for Winter most typical surfaces are:
UV-cured Factory finishes that are treated with Ultra Violet lights versus heat.
Polyurethane A clear, difficult and resilient surface that is applied as a wear layer.
Acrylic-urethane A a little various chemical make up than Polyurethane with the very same benefits.
Aluminium Oxide Contributed to the urethane finish for increased abrasion resistance of the wear layer, which is becoming extremely popular on the better grade wood floors.
Acrylic Fertilized Acrylic monomers are injected into the cell structure of the wood to provide increased hardness and then ended up with a wear layer over the wood.
Unfinished Wood Flooring
If you desire a custom stained wood flooring, or a wood flooring to match existing trim than an incomplete hardwood flooring is your answer. Unfinished means you start with a bare wood flooring and than the floor is sanded, stained, and ended up in the home. This can be quite a mess and the process does take numerous days, but your flooring will have a surface to you requirements.
Installation Options
Nail Down Secret nails are used with a wood floor covering nailer and mallet to connect the floor covering to the sub floor. Solid Strip floors or Plank floorings can just be set up on wood sub-floors or on batons.
Glue Down Engineered wood floorings and parquets can be glued down. This is when you spread out the suggested glue all over the sub flooring and lay the flooring into the glue.
Floating This is when a thin underlay is placed between the wood floor covering and the sub floor. A suggested wood glue is then used in the tongue and groove of each slab to hold the planks together. Engineered & Veneer floorings can be drifted. This is a really fast, simple and tidy method of installation.
Please speak with the maker installation instructions before installing any floor covering.