What to Know When Buying Hardwood Flooring
Hardwood flooring has helped your floors, as well as homes, look beautiful since its existence because it is one of the best and reliable options when it comes to choosing an attractive floor. There are plenty of types of hardwood flooring that you can choose from, like which kind of wood is suitable for your house or what colour matches your walls. It’s not just about looks when it comes to hardwood floors, it’s also about the feel and durability. To make sure that these floors fulfill such needs and also to make this process of selecting the perfect hardwood floor for your home a lot simpler, here are some things that you must know before visiting a store.
Best wood species to buy
Since there are different varieties of hardwood flooring, it gets trickier to decide what is the best for your home. While selecting the floor, you must keep some things in mind like what are the areas in your home where you and your family walk the most. For example, kitchen or lobby or living room. In such areas, Douglas Fir or Pine are considered and for the areas where walking is less (day and night combined), Brazilian Walnut or Oak is considered. For example, in bedroom, basement or living room. Apart from this, the colour and hardness of the wood should also be checked before buying it.
Have pets?
If you have pets then you might have to choose your hardwood floor keeping a lot of things in mind. Your pets don’t know that you spent a serious amount of money for this beautiful floor so they will scratch, urinate and leave paw marks all over. To avoid the same, you can get harder wood with an extra coating of the oil-based polymer and protection so that scratch marks don’t show and moisture doesn’t spoil the wood. The kind of wood that will work here is oak or softer pine.
Factory finish or site finished?
After you’ve bought your hardwood floor, the next step is getting it finishing done. Factory finish and site finish are two types of finishing where former can be installed faster with a top coat of hardener and latter comes is moisture resistant and has a coat of poly on top. When compared, site finished flooring is a much messier and time-consuming process than factory finished flooring. If you don’t want to spend money on any of these processes, you can finish your hardwood floor at home.
Genuine Solid Oak Flooring or Designer Engineered Oak Flooring
Although Genuine solid oak flooring is more expensive than the designer engineered oak flooring, it is advised to consider the former because engineered floors are poor in terms of durability. The chance of engineered floor getting damaged easily is higher than that of traditional hardwood floor, though it is more moisture resistant because it has a plywood base of the bottom and thin wood on the top. If you are looking for durability then Genuine Solid Oak Flooring is best for you but if you are thinking very much about the cost of installation and cost of wood then you can go for Designer Engineered Oak Flooring.
