Different Types of Hardwood Flooring for your Home
So you’ve decided that it’s time to update your home and the first thing that you have decided that you want to change is the flooring. When you first start to look into hardwood flooring, you’ll notice that there are many different hardwood floor types for your home. You’ll discover that the flooring comes in many different finishes, many different styles and many differed types of wood.
For the environmentally-conscious consumer, there is hardwood flooring made from renewable substances such as bamboo and cork. You can get bamboo flooring in its natural state and it will hold up to most wear and tear. It is also available in an engineered form where it’s used as a veneer over structural plywood. The engineered flooring doesn’t hold up nearly as well as the solid wood. It dents easily and can only be refinished once if it’s needed. Even then the veneer might be too thin to allow a decent finish on the wood.
Solid wood is available in various hardwood floor types. Before you choose however, you need to know the amount of traffic that the floor will be getting. Different hardwood floors types come with different hardness. If your room experiences a lot of traffic, then you’ll want to make sure that you get a denser, harder wood for the room such as a white oak. A softer wood like cherry would not be ideal for a whole floor since it is very soft and damages very easily, but because of its wonderful color it might make a great accent to your flooring design.
Solid hardwood floor types can be refinished a number of times, but it is still dependent on the thickness of panels. The other option that needs to be considered is whether or not you want to do the finishing on your own. Some people will opt to do this because they have the knowledge of how to finish a floor the way they want it. Also it is the cheaper of the options. You can also choose to have it factory finished, but this usually costs quite a bit more. If you do decide to order factory finished hardwood flooring, then you should get samples before you purchase the final product. Different hardwood flooring types will look different in the catalogue than when they are actually in your home.