A Comprehensive Guide on Types of Wooden Flooring

Hardwood flooring gives your home character and beauty that is unmatched by other types of flooring options so far. From an impressive range of styles, finishes and widths to choose from, it is the perfect choice to set the tone of your home décor.

Since wooden floors add to the value of your home, they are truly considered as an investment rather than an expense. Due to the advances in wooden flooring in the recent years, you can install them anywhere in your home or office and they offer the flooring options to fit any design scheme. It is significant to understand the diverse types and styles of wooden flooring before you are choosing one.

Types of  Wooden Floors:

1. Laminated: Laminated wood flooring has a layered construction with four layers compressed, covered by a photographic image of wood, stone or tile and a protective cover. This is ideal if your budget is not high enough to afford solid or engineered flooring. With todays modern technology, they are designed to look just like actual wood. The primary advantage of laminated wood flooring is its quick and easy installation as it as it requires no adhesives or nails. It is installed with the popular lock and fold installation method.

2. Solid: As the name implies, it is constructed from a single piece of wood with thickness generally ranging from 3/4” to 5/16”. Some popular solid wood species are walnut, white oak, red oak, maple, mahogany, beech and pine. Solid wood gives you a choice between prefinished planks which comes in several colors and designs and unfinished planks which can be polished on site. In order to reduce the natural movement of real wood, it is advisable to keep the homes relative humidity at between 40-55%, which can help minimize the movement within the wood flooring later. Given that solid wood is sensitive to moisture, it is not advisable to install these floors below ground level or directly over a concrete slab because of higher degrees of moisture.

3. Engineered: In engineered wood flooring, each floorboard is composed of several layers of wood glued together at right angles to make a plank of around 14mm thickness. The real wood veneer on top and the grain of each layer running in different directions makes it very strong. As a result, engineered wood expand and shrink less than solid wood flooring during  fluctuations in relative humidity and temperatures. This advantage makes it a suitable flooring option for damp basements or places that have higher relative humidity levels.

4. Acrylic Impregnated: In this type flooring, the floorboard wood grain has been injected with an acrylic material that makes it very strong and durable. It is ideal for high traffic areas such as malls, restaurants and other busy places. From a huge variety of colors and patterns to choose from, this can be utilized for home installation as well.

Wooden flooring adds value to  your home wherever they are installed. With wear and tear over time, it definitely attaches character to your home as well.