WOOD PRODUCTS

SOLID - Solid means the same piece of wood, and nothing but that wood, for the entire thickness of the floorboard.  A typical wood floorboard is 3/4 in. thick and 2 1/2 in. wide, with a tongue-and-groove profile to make it interlock.  Red and white oak still rule, together comprising more than 90% of all of the solid hardwood flooring installed nowadays.  But plenty of other species are well suited such as ash, maple, beech and cherry.  The Hardwood Council has a terrific web site that illustrates all the readily available North American species of hardwood.  If you live in an older home with wood floors, they might not be hardwood at all.  Many older homes have wide-plank pine floors, which you may want to choose if you're creating a vintage look.

PREFINISHED - Prefinished means that a multistep surface-finishing program was completed prior to the flooring's trip to the retailer.  The finish on some engineered floors is an acrylic urethane formulation containing aluminum-oxide granules, which have been added to toughen the finish.

ENGINEERED - Engineered wood flooring is a laminated produt with three to five layers.  The top layer is clear, top-quality wood.  It represents a growing percentage of the flooring market, and it often is sold prefinished.  Every major manufacturer has several product offerings, combining different features, price points and warranties.  Engineered wood is more dimensionally stable than solid wood.  So, if you have a potentially damp location, such as a room below grade, consider using engineered instead of solid-wood flooring.

PROS - Warmth, beauty, relative comfortable underfoot, enormous range of species and price, good resale value, new finishes require less maintenance, can be refinished many times (solid), dimensional stability (engineered), speed of installation, immediate use of room (prefinished).

CONS - Finish maintenance required, subject to dents, expands/contracts with humidity (solid), limited choice of stain colors/sheens (prefinished), no overall finish coat applied to "seal" seams (prefinished), limited number of refinishings (engineered).

LAMINATES

Like engineered woods, laminates are multiple sandwiches.  The visible layer is a photographic image of wood topped with a tough, clear layer of melamine that takes the wear.  Products range from 9/32 in. to 1/2 in. thick.  Laminates should be installed over a flat subfloor, which can be either a layer of plywood or even an existing vinyl or tile floor, as long as it is in sound condition.

Installations in the North American market used to require that planks be glued together.  Now 20% of the laminate-flooring products in the market are glueless:  They snap together with clever locking mechanisms tight enough to keep out liquids.  These products, more than those requiring glue, target the do-it-yourself market.

Even systems requiring glue use it only to adhere one tongue-and-groove plank to another, never to the subfloor.  A laminate floor is meant to float atop the subfloor, not be glued or nailed to it.

PROS - Easy, quick installation, portable, no damage to substrate, low to moderate cost, comfortable underfoot, no fading or yellowing, scratch resistant, simple maintenance, damaged planks can be replaced, DIY installation.

CONS - Limited style choices, can't refinish, can dent, fiberboard core problematic for some allergies.

We carry the full lines of the following manufacturers. 

Please click on their logos below to view their websites.