Solid Hardwood Flooring Has Many Advantages
Solid hardwood flooring is popular again – and for very good reason. It is durable, looks beautiful, will last forever, it’s easy to maintain and keep clean and doesn’t have to be replaced, like carpet, every few years. Another great advantage is if anyone in your family has allergies. It doesn’t matter if a carpet is made from 100% wool or 100% chemicals, people can be allergic to them.
Many people are tearing up their old carpets and then they have a choice, restore the original wood flooring if there is any, or replace the existing floors with either tile or hardwood. Hardwood is the better choice every time. Tile is cold and particularly cold on the feet, and it also cracks and breaks, it is extremely difficult to match and replace a shattered tile if it is in an obvious place. None of this will ever happen if you choose beautiful solid hardwood flooring.
Your many choices in solid hardwood flooring
When most people think of hardwood flooring they either think of pine or strips of red oak flooring. But these days it comes in many different types of wood and many different thicknesses. Thin strips of hardwood flooring, in a standard 2-1/4” widths may be mistaken for cheaper veneer flooring. Plank floors are made from much wider strips of hardwood – from three to six inch widths. You can choose to have custom cut lengths to match the exact width of your room, or do as they did in the old days and when one plank ended, start with another, giving an overall old-fashioned, rustic look (hand scraped hardwood flooring is best for this) that’s great in a hall or kitchen.
You can purchase wood floor made from maple which an extremely hard wood, to white oak and pine which is much softer. One thing to remember is that with solid wood flooring humidity should be kept constant so that boards don’t shrink in dry air and expand when it is more humid. A good company will allow for that around the edges of a room and advise you on relative humidity within your house.
Walk around any historic houses and you will find hard wood floors that have needed minimal preservation and have lasted for hundreds of years, the secret is in the type of wood you use and the expertise with which it is installed.
Maintaining solid hardwood flooring
Solid wood floors can be stripped, sanded and restained at any time for a change of décor – but it is a major job. To keep a wood floor at its best it should be stained and sealed, resealing at intervals which could be years apart.
Solid hardwood flooring will also strengthen a house, much more so than a thin veneer floor or floating wood floor that’s glued down. A ¾” solid plank, used for a hardwood floor, can last over 100 years and be sanded and restained up to seven different times, so that’s about 14 years before major maintenance is needed!
It really isn’t a terribly difficult job for the do it yourselfer, although it’s hard on the knees. If you can get all the lumber precut to size by a sawmill, then it will save you a lot of cutting and reduce the job to a fraction of the time – plus you won’t have to own expensive heavy duty cutting equipment.
Once it’s sealed, sweep with a brush and mop over occasionally with mild soap and water and your solid hardwood flooring will remain beautiful for decades to come.