If you're renovating or building, choosing your flooring is one of the first decisions you should make. Your flooring color and material will set the stage for the rest of your design choices. Make sure you pick up a sample of your new flooring so you can see how it will look with your paint color, your carpet or tile, your cabinet finishes, and your furnishings.
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If you want a beautiful, durable floor that's comfortable underfoot, then look no further than a hardwood floor. Wood flooring technology has come a long way. Wood flooring was once quite temperamental and would move with changes in temperature and humidity, causing gaps to open. New engineered wood flooring products are much more stable and provide a wear layer that's often the same width as the top layer of solid hardwood.
If you're thinking about buying wood flooring, there are a few questions you should ask first:
The recent pandemic saw a huge spike in demand for wood ' and as a result, many people buying wood flooring have discovered that many manufacturers require a long lead time for your order. At Unique Hardwood, the vast majority of our finishes (except for a few special order products) are in stock with just a seven-to-ten day lead time.
When buying wood flooring for your project, we recommend you secure your quoted price with a deposit. This will protect you from price increases that are often inevitable in the construction industry.
If you're going to install a wood floor, you need to ensure that if your subfloor is concrete, it's sealed for moisture first. Generally, your subfloors will be concrete on your main and basement levels and plywood on your upper levels. Unique Hardwood flooring can be installed directly over concrete without the need to install costly and time-consuming plywood subflooring first.
If you're just beginning your decision-making process before buying wood flooring for your home, you might find our article explaining the difference between solid wood flooring and engineered wood flooring useful. In simple terms, as we mentioned above, engineered wood flooring was invented to overcome many of the instability problems with solid wood flooring.
A considerable benefit of engineered wood flooring is that it allows for wider widths and longer lengths. Our flooring comes in five different widths ' from 140 mm (5.5') to 300 mm (almost 12'). We always recommend engineered wood over solid because it's much more stable ' and durable. You can view our different collections here. We've worked with interior designers, architects, and homeowners for years ' and they are our biggest fans.
American oak and European oak offer similar tones. European oak has warmer honeyed golden hues, and American oak is generally redder. European oak grains tend to be more intricate with wavy patterns and points of interest, while American oak has a densely packed, linear grain.
American and European oak are both durable, strong hardwood choices, but each offers a slightly different profile. European oak trees tend to grow taller than American oak, so they provide wider and longer planks ' something that's been very popular with modern interior design.
At Unique Hardwood, we are the exclusive Orange County distributor for Legno Bastone European oak flooring ' a family-owned business that's been a staple in the wood flooring industry for over 100 years. Our European oak flooring comes from fully mature trees that are sustainably harvested from forests that are centuries old. Harvesting these mature trees makes way for the saplings below to grow.
You probably already know that for timber flooring to last a long time, you'll need to finish it with a protective coating. But what should you choose ' a synthetic finish like polyurethane or a product that treats and takes care of the wood from the inside out?
A hard wax oil finish can be a lot more durable and forgiving than a polyurethane finish ' partly because it penetrates deeply into the wood. Polyurethane finishes can look and feel like plastic ' and they often scratch easily and are more costly and time-consuming to repair. You're covering your beautiful organic flooring with a layer of shellac.
Another benefit of hard wax oil finishes is that they are low maintenance and are easy to repair. They're also made from non-toxic, natural ingredients ' an essential consideration for your home.
The bottom line on finishes? If you want to achieve a high shine and are happy to have a synthetic-like plastic film on top of your flooring, you can consider polyurethane. If you would prefer a matte finish that enhances the natural surface of the wood, is durable, and is easy to maintain, hard wax oil is the finish to choose. At Unique Hardwood, we recommend hard wax oil for all our flooring.
Your flooring will take up a large part of your home. So it's essential that you can view large format samples of the different options before you make your final decision. Our flooring gallery in SoCo, Costa Mesa, has large format panels of all our finishes to allow you to get a true sense of how the product will look. We've also got samples you can take home to help coordinate your other finishes. We're 100 percent focused on making buying wood flooring easy and enjoyable for our customers.
To maintain the beauty of your floors for years, one of the most important things you can do is keep them dust free and use a recommended liquid soap. It's especially important that you do not use products like Swiffer because the alcohol will lift the finish off our floors. We recommend using Woca Natural Soap ' which is easily found on the Woca Denmark website or on Amazon.
For additional instructions on how to care for our beautiful Legno Bastone wood flooring, click here.
Buying wood flooring includes making sure you've got the right installation team. Wood floors are organic ' and no two boards are exactly the same. At Unique Hardwood, we go the extra mile to ensure that you'll love the look of your flooring before we install it. We precut and loose lay all boards for approval first ' that way, you can swap out boards or even select a wider board for your perimeter to avoid using narrow cuts. Only when you are happy do we glue down the boards.
We are incredibly proud of our Unique Hardwood installation crew ' they know our product as well as we do. They've been factory trained to be the best in the business, with over 30 years of experience.
There are many reasons you may be searching for a wide plank engineered wood floor for your upcoming
project ' cost, ease of installation, and stability. While much of this is true, not all engineered flooring is designed and crafted to meet the same standards.
Many people do not know what those standards are, but they do know they want their floor to:
We'll review four of the most important design elements in engineered hardwood flooring so you can look below the surface of pretty flooring samples. Instead, you want to consider the intrinsic differences that will help you find the highest-quality engineered floor. We'll also provide some shopping tools and tips to help you.
1. Wear Layer: A 4mm wear layer, compared to an industry standard of 2mm or 3mm, offers the same thickness of sanding as a solid floor without sacrificing stability in an engineered platform.
2. Stability: 9-11 layers of a suitable plywood substrate backing enhance stability and flooring longevity.
Engineered hardwood flooring consists of a decorative hardwood veneer top-ply bonded to an underlying core comprised of multiple backing layers. The thickness of the veneer and the core varies depending on the design and the manufacturer. This construction detail will play the biggest role in how your floor looks, how stable it will be, and how long it will last.
As you consider durable engineered wood flooring, you want to select products that meet certain criteria:
If you are looking for more details, kindly visit outdoor timber framing.
The dimensional stability of your engineered floor can be further improved by the manufacturer if they:
Most engineered wood flooring on the market is mass-produced. Even if you order the flooring all at once, mass production methods result in flooring boards in varying widths, lengths, and thicknesses, which can make for a very difficult installation. Even the color and finish of the floor can be completely different because the flooring came from a large batch rather than made per order.
Shopping Tip: Samples can be a valuable tool during the selection process. They can compare the thickness of the overall board and the individual layers and help verify the number of layers and the relative thickness of the core and veneer.
The average width of most engineered wood flooring is 3' wide; the average length is just 3' long. Let that soak in for a moment. If you have a 20 x 20 room that is nearly 535 boards you need to install!
Standard manufacturing practices are designed to produce wood flooring as fast as possible and as much as possible ' it's all about efficiency and volume.
Unfortunately, the appearance and quality of this type of flooring won't work for the client who wants a wide plank floor. Luckily, you don't have to settle for strip flooring anymore ' check out this gorgeous All 8' wide plank engineered Walnut floor from Carlisle!
When considering engineered wood flooring, you want to work with a manufacturer that can provide more options like:
In addition to achieving wider widths in your floor, you also want longer lengths. Carlisle floors are made in random lengths from 18 ' 7', 2' ' 10', or 2 -12' long, depending on the collection, and longer for some custom options; each floor is graded to achieve a certain average length within the range. This gives you peace of mind that you will receive the longer, most revered boards. This combination of widths and lengths creates fewer seams and far more beauty because you can reduce the number of seams in your floor by up to 500% when you use a wide plank floor instead of a traditional 3' floorboard.
Shopping Tip: As you shop for engineered wood flooring, verify width and length specifications on any quotes you receive and your final order documents. Don't just rely on 'word of mouth' specification details.
When you install your new wide plank floor you want it to look pretty and be stable, but you don't need or want to know that it is an engineered floor. The only way to do this is to use a veneer layer that is cut in a very specific way'this is where we are going to get a little bit technical.
There are two ways to create the veneer layer of an engineered wood floor ' use a dry sawn face that is cut with a saw blade or use a sliced and rotary peeled face that is cut with a knife blade. The first is like slicing a piece of bread and the second is like peeling a potato. They both produce different characteristics in terms of aesthetics and quality. Many people believe an engineered wood floor isn't as beautiful as a solid wood floor, but you can eliminate that concern completely by understanding what type of engineered floor you are using.
The dry sawn face method creates the same visual as a solid floor. This is achieved by giving you the same beautiful heartwood, grain, and character while achieving wider widths and lengths. This method also lets you cut a thicker veneer layer, which becomes the floor's wear layer. Using the ideal 3/16' wear layer, you now have the same wear layer as a solid wood floor. Your floor will last longer and can be sanded multiple times (if needed).
On the contrary, engineered flooring made from sliced and rotary peeled material will only produce thinner veneer layers (about 2 mm). These thinner layers don't last as long, so you must repair or replace your floor sooner. This method also boils the wood before peeling it, which can cause moisture issues with the wood down the road. Lastly, this method creates floorboards that resemble plywood more than a real wood floor.
Shopping Tip: Ask the manufacturer (or supplier/retailer) if the flooring is made from dry sawn or rotary peeled wood. You should reevaluate your source if they don't know the answer to this question. Order samples of the flooring and review photographs of the product to understand what the flooring will look like. Don't just look at the color; also consider the grain, heartwood, character, and richness of the natural color (if your samples are already finished, you can sometimes see this on the back of the sample).
When selecting a wide plank floor for a residential or commercial space, you shouldn't worry about how the floor might impact the indoor air quality.
But, we live in a global economy, and most of the flooring sold in North America today is made overseas where manufacturing practices and environmental standards may not mimic those of US manufacturers. This is where concerns about VOCs and formaldehyde can become real and impact the indoor air.
The engineered floor covering you choose should be CARB2 compliant ' one of the world's most stringent indoor air quality guidelines. If you selected a prefinished wood floor, you want to ensure it meets or exceeds the guidelines for volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which can impact indoor air quality.
If you are concerned about the environment, consider that the flooring you purchase from a 'local retailer' may be made outside North America, creating a more negative ecological footprint on our dear Mother Earth. Can you say you are shopping locally if it's not American-made? If you want to buy locally, shop with a company that manufactures their flooring in the USA. (American craftsmen proudly make Carlisle floors in New Hampshire; our wood comes from sustainably harvested American forests.)
Shopping Tip: Ask the manufacturer (or supplier/retailer) where the flooring is manufactured or what brand it is. Then, you can research where their floors are made. You also want to verify if the flooring meets CARB2 and VOC content guidelines.
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Here are a few projects where Carlisle engineered hardwood flooring was installed from Washington to Miami:
Walnut Flooring in a Seattle Waterfront Home
Sincerity Flooring Adds Warmth to Modern Home in Zionsville VIllage
White Oak is a Natural Choice for a Luxury Villa in Miami
Modern Australian Design With A Beachy Vibe in California Home
Weekend Cottage Hardwood Floor is the Natural Choice for this Manhattan Loft
Walnut Flooring in Award-Winning Lake Home