How To Buy Hardwood Flooring
I like your suggestions for putting hardwood floors in a home with pets. I think that using a lighter color to show fewer scratches would be a great idea for us. We have three puppies who love to play and wrestle. I think that their paws could definitely scratch a nice hardwood floor. I will have to look into which types of woods will be best for our situation.
how to buy hardwood flooring
My fiancé and I are trying to determine if price increase is worth nail down. We both like look better of nail down. We can cover some of upstairs for a cheaper price with engineered than just doing downstairs with nail down. Should we be concerned with buckling of hardwood? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
Thank you for the help. My wife and I are trying to decide on hardwood floors to install in our house. I had not thought at all about the width of the planks, as you discussed. Are wider planks any more durable?
Doing research for local contractors is a great idea. I want to make sure I get the best possible work on my hardwood floor. Checking reviews to make sure you get the best possible company is something I think everyone would want. Thanks for the awesome info!
The choice of flooring is one of the most basic yet important decisions a homeowner has to make when undertaking a renovation, as it underpins everything else. While there are plenty of different options, from carpet to terrazzo, one material is the acknowledged standard: hardwood.
To explore the many options available, we spoke with three experts: Scott Jones, director of product management at Carlisle Wide Plank Floors; James Caroll, principal of LV Wood; and Mara Miller, partner at the AD100 firm Carrier and Company Interiors. Once you find the perfect fit for your space, you'll need to think about installation. While may choose to hire a professional to install their floors, some intrepid homeowners go the DIY route. If you're ready to tackle the project yourself, Tony Pastrana, installation systems developer at Armstrong Flooring, shared his advice on how to install your own flooring.
Unfinished 3/4-in.-thick strips are nailed, sanded and finished on site, making this type of floor the most labor-intensive choice. It can be custom-stained for the exact color desired. Widely available in many grades of oak and maple, and almost any other species by special order. Cost: $3 to $5 per sq. ft. for flooring (oak) and finish; $8 to $12 per sq. ft. professionally installed and finished.
Prefinished strips offer more precise milling and the slight edge bevels allow nailing without sanding. The strips have a tough, factory-applied finish in a limited choice of stains and species, mostly oak and maple. Cost: $4 to $6 per sq. ft. for flooring (oak); $8 to $12 professionally installed.
Unfinished flooring must be sanded. You'll need to rent a flooring nailer and a sander. Laying a solid wood floor requires some carpentry experience. You may need a power miter saw and a table saw for cutting smooth transitions to other types of flooring and for other details.
Lay a pad and snap or glue together floating floors. Clamps hold glued edges tight until they dry. With the floating technique, you don't fasten the flooring to the subfloor. Rather you glue or snap the edges of the boards together to make a solid sheet that rests on a pad. This technique works well over concrete as well as wood subfloors. A floating floor must be free to expand and contract. Use special transitions to cover the edges where the floor meets carpeting, tile, stairs and other types of flooring. Buy a sound-deadening pad from a dealer; floating floors tend to be loud underfoot.
Do-it-yourself? A floating floor is easy to lay but requires simple carpentry skills around edges and transitions. When edge-gluing, use special clamps to make sure the joints stay tight until the glue dries. Rent or buy these clamps from the flooring dealer if you do it yourself.
The primary mission of low-cost flooring suppliers is to reduce manufacturing costs so they can charge less,primarily by sacrificing quality. Their products may appear roughly similar at first glance, and that's their goal,but there are critical differences.
Below are six important factors for you to consider when buying hardwood flooring. Be sure to weigh them carefully before you move ahead with a purchase so critical to the value and beauty of your home!
The best places to buy hardwood flooring are big box stores, trusted online retailers, and your local flooring specialists. Big box stores are best for budget flooring, online retailers are best for convenience (and prices), and local flooring stores are great for advice and a greater selection of products.
Finally, for the largest choice of wood flooring, you can browse major manufacturers online and then find a local small flooring retailer to order from. Prices might be slightly higher but you often get better, more personalized service from a small family run local retailer.
Wayfair is a very interesting online retailer that you should take a look at, they sell over 7 million products for the home from over 7000 suppliers, including of course hardwood flooring. We saw close to (a staggering) 2200 hardwood products on offer, including all the most popular brands and styles, with prices ranging from $2.87 to $20.45 per square foot. A great place to start your research if nothing else!
If Eco-friendly flooring is important to you then one of the best places to find green and sustainable harvested hardwood is Green Building Supply. They sell three quality brands, EcoTimber, Kahrs and US Floors and while the selection is quite limited the options are attractive and reasonably priced between $5 and $10 per square foot.
South Cyprus is another online flooring retailer that we really like. Their website is a pleasure to browse with a great layout and great images that will definitely get your design inspiration juices flowing! They have a good selection of hardwoods from established brands like Anderson, Columbia, Mannington, Mohawk, Mullican and more. And what they lack in quantity they make up for in quality choices with prices between $2.70 to $12.79.
This is a dedicated flooring retailer we like, with 54 stores nationwide and with new stores to come. Their physical stores are complimented by a website that is easy to use and easy to navigate. More importantly their focus is on delivering flooring products at wholesale prices to homeowners and contractors alike. At the time of writing they were offering 210 different solid and engineered hardwoods ranging in price from $1.69 to $7.20 per sq/ft
You can get both solid and engineered hardwood from Home Depot along with everything else you need from underlayment, molding and trim through to tools if you plan to do the work yourself. You can schedule a pro to come and measure your project and they provide installation services. However installation is outsourced to local contractors so why not approach local contractors yourself for free estimates and control the business relationship. The range of brands is good while not exceptional, Bruce, Mokawk, Shaw and Home Legend are among the better known names.
There are still thousands of small local and family run retailers too numerous to mention here, but later in this article we show you how to find the ones that stock the hardwood flooring brands that you like the most. The number of national retailers that specialize solely in flooring, as opposed to the general home improvement stores, is much more limited, in fact here we offer just three retailers.
Yes, for quite some time now the well-known national carpeting store has been selling all kinds of home flooring including wood, laminate, vinyl and tile. Like quite a few flooring retailers they work exclusively with their own store brands (Invincible, Rustic River and Voyager). They have a decent and very varied range of products covering many different species and installation types. Prices are higher than some others with most hardwood costing between $5 and $12 per square foot.
You can learn more about engineered hardwood floors in our core guide which covers buying, installation prices and maintenance. And click here for our reviews of the best engineered hardwood flooring brands.
Our goal is to deliver high-quality information to help homeowners decide which type of flooring to install in their homes. We work closely with qualified flooring contractors throughout the USA to provide installation and repair services for home flooring products.
Manufacturing of a hardwood floor starts with the tree itself. After trees are cut into logs, they are then cut into rough planks and then graded for look. Next, the boards are evened on all four sides to smooth the saw marks and level the plank.
You may have already envisioned the color range of hardwood that fits your style, but color is only the beginning. You also need to consider the following important things when shopping for hardwood flooring:
The hardness of the wood helps determine how well your floor will stand up to wear and tear. Each wood species carries a hardness rating, known as a Janka rating, meaning the higher the number, the harder the wood. To learn more about the different species of hardwood floors, check out our other blog here.
Like every flooring material, hardwood isn't suitable for every room, which we'll go into more detail about later. Knowing your room's environment can help you decide if hardwood is the right flooring choice for that particular space.
Although there was a time when it seemed that almost all hardwood flooring was installed in two-to-three-inch strips, many people now use wider planks (even mixing different widths together). While a floor composed of wide planks will have fewer seams than a floor of thin strips, it's important to be aware that those seams may eventually become more prominent as the wood expands and contracts. Because changes in the wood aren't distributed across as many boards, the movement may appear exaggerated. 041b061a72