Choosing Among the Different Types of Hardwood Floor Molding Types

The Importance of Hardwood Floor Moldings
After installing your beautiful hardwood floor, the next step will be installing moldings. Hardwood floor moldings hide the expansion space from view, while at the same time framing your floor to anchor the overall look of the room. They also ease the transitions of the floors from one room to another, or from one level to another.

Different types of hardwood floor moldings serve different purposes, aside from tying and coordinating the floor with the rest of the room.

• Quarter Round Molding - this type of hardwood floor molding is used to hide the expansion gap that is left around the walls when hardwood floor boards are being installed.

• T Molding - a T molding is used to transition between different types of flooring, but with similar height.

• Reducer Molding - this molding is used to transition from the height of the subfloor to the height of the hardwood floor. One-sided reducers are used against solid objects such as sliding door areas, while an overlap reducer is used for floating or engineered floors when transitioning to other floor coverings of lower height such as carpet, ceramic tile, and vinyl.

• Stair nose Molding - a stair nose molding for hardwood floors is used on the edge of a stair step.

• Stair tread Molding - this type of hardwood floor molding is used to cover the stair tread.

• Baseboard - this flat-profiled hardwood molding is installed horizontally against dry wall or plaster board.

Preparing to Install Hardwood Floor Moldings
The same preparations done prior to installing hardwood flooring should be done when installing hardwood floor moldings. This means the moldings must also be acclimated in the installation site for a few days so the moldings will get used to humidity and temperature conditions. Installation surfaces must be flat.