Buying Wood Flooring

Hardwood Floor Tips 1 - 4

Pretty, popular, and proven—wood flooring has a lot going for it, but getting the right one for your home means making smart choices about wood type, installation, finishing, and maintenance. What's more, some manufactured products now offer a realistic wood look, giving you more options than ever. Here are nine of the most important things you need to know when deciding if a wood floor is part of your remodeling plan.

1. Consider your options.

Genuine wood flooring comes in several variations, from elaborate parquet "tile" to rustic, rough-sawn wide planks. Narrow strip flooring is the most common for residential use.

2: Compare hardwoods and softwoods.

Oak is abundant and affordable, but you'll also find other domestic hardwoods, such as hickory, maple, walnut, and cherry.

Tropical hardwood flooring come with high costs and environmental concerns, but in larger metropolitan areas you can often find mahogany, teak, or jatoba (called Brazilian cherry) flooring.

Bamboo flooring (a grass, not a wood) is an increasingly popular substitute at a similar cost.

Softwoods don't hold up well to the wear and tear inflicted on floors, so you'll see only a few options here: Some grades of Douglas-fir and Southern yellow pine are still harvested and milled for flooring, and longleaf heart pine offers good wear resistance.

3: Turn to nature, with a twist.

Engineered wood flooring, a relative newcomer, features multiple thin layers of wood glued together with a face veneer about 1/8-inch thick; it's more stable and less expensive than solid wood flooring and often is sold prefinished.

4: Research installation and finishing techniques.

Wood strip flooring is attached to a nailable subfloor with fasteners. Wide plank flooring might be fastened with screws driven through the exposed face and covered with wood plugs. Parquet flooring often is glued to the substrate with a thick adhesive called mastic. Prefinished flooring saves time and avoids the mess of sanding new flooring and applying stain and/or varnish.