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Types of Wood Flooring

Are you thinking of installing wood flooring in your home?  It’s a very popular choice, and many people are going with wood instead of carpet or tile.  Wood flooring looks amazing, even the easy-to-install engineered wood flooring, which is very affordable.  Wood flooring is flexible, sturdy, and will last for years.

There are two main types of wood flooring: solid and engineered.  Both come in different styles and dimensions.  Note that neither of these types of flooring are laminate, veneer, or vinyl.  Those materials are not actually wood at all.  Instead, they just look like wood or, in the case of veneer, use only a very, very thin layer of wood.

Solid hardwood flooring used to be the standard, and it’s what you’ll find in many older homes.  Putting down true solid hardwood floors can be costly, time consuming, and even somewhat difficult.  Each plank of flooring is made of solid wood and is milled from one solid piece of timber.  Planks come in different sizes and thicknesses, with the thickest usually about 100 mm.  Any thicker and the floor may lose its structure.

Solid hardwood floors actually gain and lose moisture depending on the environment around them.  Because of this, there’s no standard size or thickness of the planks; it really depends on where you live.  While old solid hardwood floors were installed over wooden support beams, today they can be installed directly over a concrete slab.  There’s no crawl space under them, which can help with climate control and with insect infections.

Then there’s engineered flooring.  This type of wood flooring is actually made up of two or more layers of wood.  These layers are formed together into a plank.  The top layer, called the lamella, is the only layer that is actually visible, however.  The lamella is really just for show; the core of the plank, or the substrate, is the wood that actually provides the stability of the floor.

Today, engineered flooring is the most common type of wood flooring used in homes and buildings around the world.  It’s very easy to install, and it has more uses than solid wood flooring.  Engineered wood, for example, generally comes pre-finished and features beveled edges, which make it look different from solid wood.  

Engineered wood has a few advantages over solid wood flooring.  While engineered wood is a bit more expensive, its installation cost is lower.  Panels are larger than solid planks, too, so you need fewer of them.  This means installation cost is often actually lower than solid wood flooring, even though the cost per panel is higher.  It also is more stable and can be installed faster.  It’s easy to replace one or two boards, mainly because the floor actually “floats”—they’re not fastened to either the floor below or to other planks.