There are many reasons people love wood floors for their homes, businesses, or commercial spaces. They look great, wear well and are easy to clean. Sometimes, however, deciding just what type of wood floor is best can be difficult. Which floor is best suited to meet your needs? Do you go for solid hardwood, engineered hardwood, reclaimed wood, or eschew natural materials altogether and try a wood-look laminate floor? Here we’ll answer some of the most commonly asked questions about engineered hardwood flooring.
1. What is Engineered Hardwood?
Generally, engineered hardwood flooring is made up of a thin layer of hardwood over top of a base consisting of additional layers of wood that make the floor more stable and less prone to warping.
At Forestry Timber, our floors are three layers: a top layer of sustainably harvested hardwood, a core layer using Hevea Brasiliensis – a plantation hardwood that is as strong as white oak – and a bottom timber layer. This combination works to ensure our floors are less prone to cupping, expanding, or contracting when exposed to moisture, humidity, or extremes in temperature.
2. What is the Difference Between Engineered and Solid Wood Flooring?
Where engineered wood flooring has multiple layers (as mentioned above), solid hardwood is just that – a plank of solid hardwood without a base layer.
With solid hardwood, your floor is more susceptible to expanding and contracting depending on the weather. For example, if you live in a very cold and/or dry climate, solid wood floors are likely to contract and develop small gaps in between the planks, especially during drier months.
The science behind the multiple layers of engineered hardwood flooring means that properly installed engineered hardwood is significantly less likely to be affected by extremes in weather. Further, engineered hardwood floors re finished more consistently, reducing the possibility of gaps, bowing and uneven edges sometimes seen with solid hardwood floors.
Because solid hardwood floors are typically between ½” and ¾” thick (1.7cm to 1.9 cm), they can be sanded down more frequently than engineered hardwood. However, there does come a point at which you cannot sand a solid wood floor anymore without making the floor too thin and exposing the nails.
3. How Environmentally Friendly are Engineered Hardwood Floors?
At Forestry Timber we take pride in our floors and have gone to great lengths to ensure all our finishes and processes are environmentally friendly with zero emissions. We use only legally sourced wood from sustainably managed forests for our flooring products and are certified by several international organizations like FSC® PEFC™ FloorScore® and Eurofins.
Further, we use Hevea as the core and Sengon as the foundation of our wood floors. Both species are plantation wood, and we use it when it has reached the end of its natural lifecycle – giving us a high-quality hardwood to use for our floors while facilitating the growth and maturation of younger trees. The use of wood harvested from plantations enables us to actively participate in significantly reducing our carbon footprint.
In fact, engineered hardwood floors have less impact on the environment than a traditional hardwood floor.
4. What type of Wood is Used for Engineered Hardwood Floors?
Another of the many benefits of deciding to use engineered hardwood flooring is the large selection of woods and finishes to choose from. Due to the additional strength of engineered hardwood floors as a result of the strong core and foundation layers, you have more choice as to which species to use for your floors. Not only do we work with the ever-popular Western European Oak, Ash, American Pecan and Tasmanian Oak; we also create floors using Australian Blackbutt, Blue Gum, American Black Walnut, Mahogany and American Cherry just to name a few.
5. How to Clean Engineered Hardwood Floors
Given wood flooring is an investment, it’s important to know how to care for your floors to keep them in great condition. Thankfully, cleaning your wood floors needn’t be something to worry about. Making sure to wipe up any spills immediately, sweeping or vacuuming your floors daily to lift any sand, grit or large dust particles that can scratch your floors and using floor protectors on any furniture that gets moved around (chair legs, coffee tables, etc.) are some of the best ways to take care of your floor.
At Forestry Timber, we take pride in the exceptional quality of the floors we produce. From ethically sourced and legally harvested timber for our floors, the quality of the finishes we use, our commitment to the environment, and the calibre of our entire work force to name a few – our products are second to none.
If you are interested in carrying any of our brands – Woodline Parquetry, TimberTop, FloorArt Parquetry Elyseum Fertigparkett, or Sienna Parquetry – would like to find one of our distributors, reach out to any one of our sales team and they will be more than happy to help.
Hardwood flooring engineered for living, Designed to Impress.