BDU Hardwood College™

Hardwood Flooring: Beauty and Strength in Quality Floors

What you will learn: advantages of hardwood flooring; varieties of hardwood flooring including engineered hardwood; varieties of surface appearance including hand-scraped hardwood flooring.

Choosing hardwood flooring can mean taking the reins of your own history; you will be instrumental is defining your living or working space for years to come. Apart from the obvious advantages of durability and beauty, you will have opened a whole new avenue of possibilities for look, feel, and budget flexibility in your home or commercial project.

To begin with, hardwood flooring in general offers some very significant advantages to the property owner, from increasing the market value a property, to the hypoallergenic benefits, and the sense of permanence which is delivered by the look and feel of hardwood flooring. Overall, this flooring option is very diverse in terms of style, cut, finish, and color. But, there remain several other factors to consider once you have given serious thought to whether hardwood flooring is the right choice for you.

One such choice is whether you want to install a solid hardwood floor, or whether an engineered floor is a better option for you. This choice depends upon the kind of subfloor, whether the floor is above or below grade, moisture levels common to the installation space, and whether the hardwood floor is installed over radiant heat. These issues are addressed as we proceed here.

Another matter you are no doubt interested in is the surface appearance of the hardwood itself. Do you want to have a smooth finish, or a more rustic look? If it’s the rustic look, perhaps a hand-scraped hardwood floor would be attractive. This option offers a surface on which a craftsman has carefully sculpted the contours of the natural wood by scraping the surface of the hardwood. The result is a very stylish surface that also has a more "lived in" look. With all of these considerations, along with the colors offered by various species of hardwood and the various stains which are also available, hardwood flooring is an option that provides you considerable flexibility in terms of look and feel.

Because of the varied choices available to you, your goal of achieving a unique look to reflect your individual taste is readily at hand with hardwood flooring.

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