Do you need to choose between wooden flooring and ceramic tiles? Each type of flooring has its pros and cons. For example, ceramic tiles are much cheaper materials than natural hardwood. However, there is something special about natural wooden flooring that ceramic tiles can never replicate. It offers a natural appearance to the inside of your home. Then you won’t feel so bad if you’re cooped up indoors for long periods.

Think about the wide variety of colors, patterns, and designs that are found on wood. You can even request engineered wood that has the style and design you want for your flooring. Furthermore, Bespoke wooden flooring is so much easier to clean and maintain because its surface has been sanded and finished. This means you can easily wipe away dirt, debris, and food spills. 

Let’s go over the top 3 benefits of choosing wooden flooring over tiles.

1) Easy Installation

Ceramic tile requires you to make a lot of preparations before you lay down the tiling. Wooden flooring is much simpler to install because you lay the wood down, and that is it. If the wood has a tongue and groove to it, then it won’t be hard to fit the wood pieces together and glue them securely.

2) Warming Capabilities

If you ever want to install an underfloor heating system, then you can only do that if you have wooden flooring. Underfloor heating will not work with ceramic tiles. You may not care about having heated floors unless you’re tired of your feet being cold. 

3) More Durability

Tiling tends to crack very easily. If you plan to keep your flooring for a long time, then you will find that solid wood flooring is more durable. It can last for several years if you perform basic maintenance on it periodically. This means cleaning up messes and giving it the occasional polishing.

Conclusion

As you can see, wooden flooring is the best choice. Give up the ceramic tile flooring because it does not add value to your home. Natural wood flooring can add so much more value, which makes it the perfect investment to make. 

Wood Flooring Selection for Elegant Spaces

Homeowners love to add wooden flooring to their homes because it is a great way to transform their living space into something special. Of course, there are several different types of wood to choose from for the flooring. Each type of wood has a unique color, texture, and finish. Before you choose the wood for your flooring, you might want to consider whether it matches the décor of your home.

wood flooring is essential to have because it is durable flooring that can tolerate all the walking that happens on it. This will also give your home more value because homebuyers love hardwood floors. As for the appearance, browse through the various finishes and colors of the available hardwood.

Remember that you can put wood flooring in any room of your home and it will look great. Most people put it in their kitchens and living rooms, but it may also work well in bathrooms and bedrooms. Just beware of the moisture issues that you might have in your bathroom if you decide to put wooden flooring in it. Moisture can damage wood easily if you don’t have proper ventilation in the room. Add lamination to the flooring to protect the surface more from moisture exposure.

Your wooden flooring choices come down to two main options. You can either go with the lighter beech solid woods (Scandinavian Chic) or the rustic country darker woods. The Scandinavian style is better for minimalists who have light-colored walls and fewer possessions exposed in the room.

For instance, you could have lighter wood flooring in the living room to match the white walls and aqua-blue furniture. That would blend very well together. As for the darker rustic wood, that might look better in your kitchen where you do a lot of cooking. Just in case any messes fall on the floor, the rustic appearance will blend very well with food stains and messes. And if you have a lot of possessions lying around in any of your rooms, then a darker wooden floor is better.

Conclusion

You can learn a lot about the types of wooden flooring available by conducting searches on the internet and comparing the looks of each wood type.

A lot of homeowners would love to have hardwood flooring in more rooms of their homes, but they don’t like the feeling of cold wood on their feet.

Fortunately, modern technology allows homeowners to have an underfloor heating system beneath their wooden flooring. This is a warming system that raises the temperature of your wooden flooring. It can also add heat to the rooms of your home as well.

Have you ever walked barefoot on your wooden flooring? It is pretty cold, right? It gets even colder in the wintertime when the outdoor temperatures are below freezing. If you try to walk barefoot on freezing wooden flooring, it is going to be a rather unpleasant experience.

For this reason, you need to consider installing an underfloor heating system. It’ll heat your wooden flooring so that it stays warm at all times, even during the brutal cold of the winter months. Then you can stay comfortable as you walk around your house without any shoes or socks on your feet.

Heat is distributed evenly throughout each room that has wooden flooring. The underfloor heating system is a smaller unit than your average radiator, and yet, it can do a better job of heating your rooms than a radiator. This means you will save more money on your electric bill each month because the underfloor heating system does not consume nearly as much power as a radiator. More importantly, the temperature of your rooms will stay heated too.

Choosing the Right Wood

Underfloor heating doesn’t work with all types of wood. The thermal conductivity of the wood must be taken into consideration. In general, if you have thin wooden flooring, then it will be easier and quicker for the underfloor heating system to heat the wood. This also means the system won’t have to work as hard to get the flooring at the right temperature.

You have a choice between engineered wood and hardwood. The cheaper of the two is engineered wood. It is made to look like natural wood, and it absorbs heat well. Hardwood is completely natural, but also a little more expensive. As long as you choose dense wood, then it will have a high level of thermal conductivity.

Have you ever seen oak flooring in a commercial environment? You have probably not seen it if you’ve only been to offices and retail stores. They like to use either carpeting or tile on their floors. This is understandable because oak flooring is solid and durable. If someone were to fall on the floor, they’d likely get hurt worse by the oak material versus the carpeting or tile. Companies want to avoid lawsuits by keeping their flooring the way it is.

Also, you need to consider the heavy traffic in a commercial wood Flooring environment. If people were constantly walking back and forth on oak flooring and moving furniture and chairs on them, it would create scuffs and marks on the wood. And if there is a lot of moisture in your commercial environment, then it would cause the wood to dry out and form cracks. There’s no real upside to oak flooring in a commercial environment other than the aesthetic appeal. But even that won’t last long if it gets scratched and scuffed repeatedly every day. 

So, what is the solution here? Is there any commercial environment that can accommodate oak flooring? Sure, but it won’t be in all the rooms of your commercial building. You could put oak flooring in rooms where there isn’t a lot of work activity taking place. Some good examples of this include waiting rooms, cafeterias, and lounge areas.

On the other hand, not all commercial environments are busy places with dozens of people walking around each day. You might have a small commercial environment like a real estate office or coffee shop which can benefit more from the rustic appearance of the wood. Everyone loves the look of oak flooring, so it would certainly impress your clients or customers when they enter your facility. There is practically no maintenance required either, so you can focus all your attention on your business and the work it entails.

Overall, there are two deciding factors for whether you should have oak flooring installed in a commercial environment. The two factors are your budget and the level of traffic in your building. Oak flooring is more expensive than softwood, tile, and carpeting, so make sure you have the money set aside for it.

Finally, don’t get the oak flooring if you have a high-traffic facility. The oak might be strong, but it can only take so much abuse before it starts to crack up and change color. Keep these two things in mind, and you should be okay.

Flooring is a very important feature of any home. You may have carpeting on the floors of your living room and bedrooms, but does it really look attractive? Sure, carpets are soft to walk on, but they get dirty easily. Dirt particles and bug larvae build up underneath the surface of carpets to where you cannot see them. Even vacuuming your carpets doesn’t always get rid of it all.

You don’t need to settle for carpets on your flooring any longer. Rip up those annoying carpets and replace them with oak hardwood flooring. This might seem like a ridiculous idea because hardwood is a tougher, colder surface on your feet. But there are several advantages to switching to oak flooring that you might not have realised before.

Let’s go over those advantages now:

1) Easier to Clean

Say goodbye to scrubbing up stains and messes. When food or liquid falls onto an oak floor, you can easily wipe it away clean. There is no scrubbing required. Try to wipe up the mess quickly, though. Don’t leave it on the wood for too long or else the mess will harden onto the texture.  

2) Durable and Long Lasting

Oak hardwood flooring has a very long lifespan. Oak is a durable material which can withstand many years of walking and placing heavy furniture on it. You shouldn’t need to replace the oak in your lifetime.

3) Helps Cool the Home

Oak hardwood has a natural tendency to stay cool no matter what the temperature is inside or outside. This comes in very handy in the summertime because you can cool your feet after you come inside from under the hot sun. The indoor temperature also stays cooler because of the flooring too.

4) Increase the Value of Your Home

Every homeowner is looking for a simple way to increase the value of their home. By installing oak hardwood flooring, you can easily increase your home’s value. If you put your home for sale on the market, it’ll have twice as much chance of selling with oak hardwood flooring present.

Conclusion

If you can invest just one-time into high-quality oak hardwood flooring for your home, then the investment will pay off for many years to come. So yes, you are definitely ready for oak flooring.

Do you lack an oak floor in your home? Are you wondering if you should go from no oak floor to a new oak floor? If so, do not worry because the installation job is not as hard as you might think. It is actually easier to install a new oak floor when you currently don’t have an oak floor. Otherwise, you’d have to rip up the old oak floor from the foundation, clean up the debris, and then install the new oak floor. That would obviously take a lot more time and effort.

But first, do you really need a new oak floor? If you don’t already have one, then you probably have either tile or carpet on your flooring. Tiling has its advantages and disadvantages, so you may decide to keep it under certain circumstances. The advantages are that tile is a cheaper material which is easier to clean than oak. The disadvantages are that tile is not as sturdy and strong as oak. Tile also doesn’t look as natural and homely as oak either.

As for carpeting, you may have given up on it a long time ago. The only real advantages of carpeting are that it feels soft and warm on your feet. Besides that, carpeting attracts pet hair, dust, mould, dirt, and lots of other nasty elements that you don’t want in your house. If you were to rip up all your carpeting and replace it with oak flooring, you’d notice a significant improvement in the aesthetics and cleanliness of your indoor home environment.  

However, the cost may be the one thing which prevents you from getting a new oak floor. The average cost per square foot of oak is between £3 and £7. When installing oak hardwood flooring in an entire home, the national average is about £3,000. If you were to choose a softwood instead, you could reduce this price by about 50%.

The only problem is softwood is not as durable, so it would defeat the purpose of getting a new wood floor in the first place. Oak may be more expensive, but it can last for several decades if basic maintenance and upkeep are performed on it. That is the main reason why you should choose to get a new oak floor. Once you have it installed, it will remain in your house for several generations. You’ll never need to worry about getting new flooring again.

Distressed oak flooring is a type of new hardwood floor which is purposely modified or engineered to look worn, old, and rustic. The only difference is the distressed oak flooring won’t have the huge splits and textured grain that a truly old oak floor would have. It basically gives you the best of both worlds because you get the appearance of a distressed oak floor but without any of the setbacks.

You can choose between engineered and solid distressed oak flooring. All distressed oak flooring has boards with different sized knots in them. These boards may have small holes and cracks, along with some colour differences. When the boards are put through the distressing process, their natural grains become darker. The brushed surface texture of the boards makes them look even older.

The three finishes available for distressed oak flooring are light, medium, and heavy. Lightly distressed oak flooring has had very little distressing done to the boards. The edges are where most of the distressing can be seen. The boards have a small tint of colour, but they don’t look nearly as old as the other two finishes.

Medium distressed oak flooring has a moderate level of darkness on the boards and up to the edges. You can still see some of the natural oak colour, but it is merged with a darker distressing colour to resemble an older age. People who look at medium distressed oak flooring might think it is about 10 to 50 years old.

Heavy distressed oak flooring is a finish which makes the boards look hundreds of years old. The colour is almost entirely dark, so make sure you really want the old oak appearance if you go with the heavy distressed finish. If you’re restoring an old home that was built before 1930, then heavily distressed oak flooring might be appropriate. But if you’re merely replacing the flooring in a newer house, then light or medium distressed oak flooring would be fine.

If you had to make a safe choice, then go with the medium distressed oak flooring because it gives you a mixture of colours. You still get to see some of your real flooring colour while incorporating the distressed finishing colour onto it as well. Visitors might get a real sense of family by seeing flooring like this.

Lightly distressed flooring is hardly distressed at all. These lighter coloured boards look like they’re no more than 1-year old. This might be a good thing if you’re trying to restore your home and want to make its flooring look new. It is something to consider at least.