We are so often asked the same questions time and time again about basic concerns by potential clients who are interested on which type of best wooden flooring to use for there home, shop or commercial premises. In our case we only deal with European Oak but the same principles apply to all the timbers and different species of wood flooring. It is so worth while doing your home work on this subject before you purchase your flooring.
Just to pay more certainly does not mean that you get a better product and in many cases the smaller family run companies can give you better advise and often give you a keener price due to the fact that they have often lower running costs. So do shop around and certainly do not look totally with the top named companies that you find time and time again on the web as their staffs main objective will be to sell and not necessarily give you the best advise for your situation oak engineered wood flooring.
The 2 main varieties of flooring that we are going to take a look at today is a choice of solid or an engineered method of wood flooring. Solid wood flooring has stood the pace of time for many years and has certainly still got a firm place inside the industry today. We certainly have sold solid oak flooring for over 35 years and still do. But our engineered Oak flooring in this present day far outsells our solid oak.
Most Solid wood flooring is given a tongue along with a groove all around the board so that it simply slots together. We now a days here the word “were layer”. This really is simply the thickness of solid wood from the top of the tongue to the top surface belonging to the board. This is important if maybe in years into the future you choose to re sand your floor or refurbish the top layer. I would always advice that 6mm would be a good thickness to always aim for. Solid flooring, or in our case solid Oak flooring is really a total natural product so will move i.e. shrink and swell over the width of each and every board.
Moisture humidity or damp are the main factors to cause it to swell or extreme dryness and heat can cause it to shrink. In our climate we may have both of these factors. It is therefore essential to permit that your overall width of floor may swell and shrink. If previsions have not put in place permitting for this a disaster is likely to occur with the flooring could start buckling up in the centre of your respective room as its overall widths increases as each board swells. A gap between the walls should always be built in place to permit the flooring to move.
An Engineered board is a total different creature. engineered oak flooring suppliers Generally a layer of solid hardwood would be glued on the top side of an man made composite material. This gives the stability and certainly helps to eliminate the movement that we talked about in the above paragraph. Unfortunately during that last few years in our ever changing competitive world some low grade engineered boards have found their way onto the market place. If you want a high quality product that will last always look for the top layer of hardwood to be 6mm thick.
This then gives you the same “ware layer” as the solid oak that we talked about in the first paragraph. The second major point is to look for the under layer to be of a good quality plywood. The ply wood should be 15 mm thick and made up from ten laminates. This is a standard plywood and is readily available. Ten laminates gives a great deal of stability as each laminate (or layer of wood) goes in opposite directions. This gives simply the best stability you can ask for. Do not except anything less as mainly companies will offer you a different under layer as it can be produced cheaper and will tern out to be an inferior product.
If the the solid layer of hardwood is the same species and same grade of timber as used in the solid flooring the visual effect of your engineered wood floor will be the same and you will gain a more stable user friendly product that in the long run will be better and much faster to put down or install. It generally comes in much wider and longer boards which again can look better. Engineered flooring can also be used in most cases on underfloor heating systems. But always ask before you purchase.