Pay heed to your home?s environment before installing wooden flooring

Wooden floorings are as sensitive as us; they react to our environmental surroundings, in pretty much the same way as we do. However, many people are not aware of this fact, which is why wooden floorings often tend to go awry in the long run.

Even though solid wooden flooring is made of dead wood, there is no denying the fact that the flooring reacts to temperature and humidity as if the wood was alive. No matter if the flooring is of solid wood or engineered wood; irrespective of the flooring and the tree type, chances are if you are not comfortable inside your own house, your wooden flooring might be suffering as well.

Every wooden flooring installer knows the importance of installing wooden floors inside a controlled environment. This way, when the temperature is controlled, the moisture content in the environment is unable to have an adverse impact on the condition of the flooring. Generally speaking, the required moisture range inside the house should be between 60 to 80 degrees only.

What if the weather changes inside the house are not favorable?

As discussed above, a lot of times it may so happen that the weather changes inside the house are not favorable. Wood has a tendency to shrink and grow, depending on the weather conditions. If the wood is installed in a house with a lot of environment fluctuations, chances are your floors are going to react accordingly.

As soon as the humidity levels rise, your wood will expand and vice versa. For this very reason, wooden floors often have gaps around the edges, to allow sufficient spacing to swell and expand. In cases where there is a massive fluctuation in the humidity, the wood will expand beyond these gaps, thereby causing the gaps to be damaged permanently. Even when the floors shrink back, the gaps will never go back to normal, causing a lot of problem for the home owners.

On the contrary, there might also be circumstances when the humidity falls drastically. In such cases, the obvious answer which comes to mind is: the floor shrinks. Suddenly, when this happens, you will see gaps along the sides of the floors, which is also permanent. Even when the floors expand, the gaps might not get filled up completely.

Unfortunately, none of this damage is covered by your flooring warranty, which makes it an even bigger bummer. The more the installation cost, the more it would pinch to have the floors repaired. Ideally, when you invest in wooden flooring, you should also invest in an air conditioner and an air dehumidifier, to keep your humidity levels in check. While this might sound to be a very expensive option at the beginning, rest assured, you would thank your lucky stars later on, when your floors last for a lifetime.

If you are someone who likes to leave their homes unoccupied during the winter season, then it’s best to not turn off the heat completely. You would not like the condition of your floors, when you come back home. Unfortunately, whether you like it or not, but your floors never go on vacation; this is the only way to ensure you don’t end up burning a bigger hole in your pocket than you had intended before.