Wooden Flooring Info

Solid oak flooring can add a beautiful touch to your home. Attractive and durable, this floor will bring personality along with it. Solid oak flooring is made from planks that are joined together at the edges. Traditionally, the edges are square, and that’s what you will see in most homes. Some people, however, prefer something a bit different than a straight line, and for those they tongue and groove edges. That’s right; even the edges of the planks of your solid oak flooring can have character.

There are three different grades, or qualities of solid oak flooring; Select, Country, and Wormy.

All solid oak flooring will have some imperfections in it; that’s the nature of wood flooring in general. Select solid oak flooring, however, will have the fewest by far. The planks for these wood floors are chosen from the best of the best of all the solid oak flooring planks available. They have the least worm holes and scars. They’re also generally more expensive, and not necessarily desirable to all customers. Be sure to consider the look of the rest of your home before assuming that select solid oak flooring is the best option for you.

Wormy solid oak flooring is the exact opposite. Don’t worry, there’s not any actual worms in there, it’s just filled with worm holes, scars, and sometimes even nail holes. Wormy solid oak flooring has real personality. It would be impossible to find any two planks that looked remotely alike, and that is the main draw to the wormy quality of solid oak flooring. This style would probably be best in an older home with a rustic theme, or maybe something like a log cabin. Although select solid oak flooring would fit in just fine, wormy solid oak flooring would look really silly inside a multi-million dollar mansion. Unless that multi-million dollar mansion happened to have a very, very rustic theme, in which case the wormier the better!

The other type of solid oak flooring is called country. Country solid oak flooring is basically a good, healthy compromise between select and wormy, having much the same character as the latter but without going overboard with it. Most people who choose solid oak flooring will likely go with the country quality of wooden flooring, as it very much maintains the rustic charm of the wormy wood floor, while at the same time being a bit less enthusiastic about its marks and holes.  Most wooden flooring sales will comprise of country quality product.

If you’re looking for cheap wooden flooring, you’ll probably be limited to country or wormy, depending on current supply.  If that’s not cheap enough for you, though, you may have to look at engineered wooden flooring instead.

 August 17th, 2009  admin   No comments