PREFINISHED HARDWOOD FLOORING
You may love the look of hardwood floors, but feel like the work involved isn’t worth the beauty. Although hardwood floors require a little more TLC, prefinished hardwood flooring takes away the added work of traditional, non-finished flooring. If you’re thinking of doing some remodeling in your home, Nature Wood Floors can help, with installation services available anywhere in the United States!
The Basics of Hardwood
The prefinished applications in flooring has been around since the 1940s, but there’s a wide variety of stains and colors to match any home today. The prefinish in these floors are typically coated with multiple layers of an aluminum-oxide-infused polyurethane and then cured under UV lights.
This process creates a beautiful shine and offers more protection against wear and tear over the lifetime of your floors. It’s not perfect by any means, but delivers lasting results that you don’t have to spend extra time maintaining yourself.
Your basic hardwood flooring isn’t stained and sealed until it’s installed, significantly cutting back on the ruggedness of the sealant available for most floor installers. Thus, most floors go about five to seven years before they start showing wear and tear, while prefinished flooring can last up to 25 years without slowing down.
Although with prefinished flooring your options aren’t as wide as traditional hardwood, you’ll still get a fairly wide range of maple and red oak wood types. Installing your floor with prefinished hardwood flooring is a breeze, too, allowing you to walk on the floor as soon as it’s installed. And prefinished flooring can always be restrained if you want to switch up your styles after a few years.
Traditional hardwood can take weeks to install with getting the flooring into place, sanding the floor, staining and then coating the floor with a multiple layers of sealant takes time, and often creates a lot of unwanted toxic fumes.
Prefinished Hardwood Flooring For The Win
If you’re feeling that prefinished flooring is the way to go for your home, making the right selection within the prefinished types can also help you save time and money. The basic plank width size is between 3” to 4 3/4”, making it preferable over the shorter width planks, as it will be more time-consuming to install the shorter planks.
The wider the planks, the smaller it may make the room appear, so if you are leaning towards the higher width size, it may look better in a bigger room where it won’t condense the appearance of the floor size.
Most hardwood’s durability is tested based on the Janka Scale, where the higher the number on the scale, the harder the wood. If you have a lot of foot traffic, pets and children included, getting a hard wood such as white oak would be your best bet as it’s a stronger wood on the Janka Scale.
If during your shopping you come across the term “engineered hardwood”, keep in mind it is different from prefinished flooring. Engineered hardwood is laminate planks with a thin layer of hardwood on the surface. They have their own list of positives, but they also can’t be refinished, and most of their coating finishes are on the cheaper side, dulling and showing their age quicker.
Contact Us
If you’re ready to make the switch to prefinished wood flooring, you’re in luck. Nature Wood Floors can get you fast, reliable flooring installation, leaving you with a beautiful, durable flooring for years to come. Based in Tampa, we can install your floor anywhere in the United States! Give us a call today!
