Solid hardwood flooring is an investment for your home. Over an average 45-year lifetime, the wear layer of the floorboards can be sanded and refinished 3 - 5 times. Each sanding will provide a new look and feel of natural beauty allowing you to recolor the floor and change the decor for your personalized space.
Engineered hardwood flooring takes solid wood and maximizes its coverage potential by applying real wood layers to a plywood or high-density fiberboard substrate. Depending on the thickness of the real wood wear layer (0.6mm - 4mm on average), 3 - 12 pieces of engineered flooring can be manufactured for every one piece of 3/4" thick solid wood flooring.
Engineered flooring is the total package - the look and feel of solid wood flooring, at a reduced cost, and can be installed almost anywhere.
There’s a new, somewhat surprising trend going on in homes across the nation; surprising because it involves the words “vinyl” and “luxury”! That’s right – vinyl is now luxurious! In fact with luxury vinyl tile and vinyl plank flooring (LVT & LVP for short) what we’re dealing with is a whole new kind of vinyl, one that is indeed much more sophisticated and much more desirable than the plasticky sheet vinyl of the 70’s. So what is LVT and what makes it so different?
For a start, this is not vinyl in sheets, LVT either comes in tile or plank form. Secondly, and this is the most important bit, new printing and photographic technologies means that luxury vinyl flooring can be made to authentically mimic both the look and the texture of real wood or stone products (the best stone-look tiles will actually have limestone composite added to the vinyl mix for greater authenticity). But best of all, these “nearly real” luxury vinyl tiles and vinyl planks are often cheaper than the real thing!
It is this combination of price and fantastically improved realism that is proving the defining reason for the rise and rise of LVT’s popularity. As Annette Callari on the World Floor Covering Association website states, “the look and feel of nature’s best materials at a lower cost are a reality of luxury vinyl tile flooring manufacturing”. LVT is so realistic these days that you can even get specially formulated grout to finish off stone-look tiles for extra realism. And then when you add to that the inherent high performance, durability and easy maintenance of vinyl – you’re clearly onto a winner.
LVT also offers a lot of flexibility design-wise. Along with wood and stone looks, there are graphic patterns, block colors and unusual textures also available such as mosaic pebbles or indented steel panels – see below for our round-up of the biggest LVT design trends. What’s more, as vinyl wood flooring is often installed as a floating floor, it also offers less permanent flooring solutions than the authentic materials. This is a huge plus for both interior design magpies and people who aren’t yet living in their “forever home”.
For all of the above reasons, luxury vinyl planks and tiles are now being featured in all areas of the home. Whereas vinyl was once considered only suitable for less visible areas of a house like the laundry room, or in areas where you would expect it’s durability and water resistance to be useful like kitchens and bathrooms, designers are now using it everywhere!
Laminate Flooring is not made of real hardwood; however, no one will ever know. Their durability and affordability fit most budgets and active lifestyles while the selection of patterns and colors is limitless. Best of all, installation is a breeze. For your home, office or condo and move furniture into place the minute you finish.
The comfort and durability of cork flooring has been enjoyed in churches and libraries since 1898. With all of its natural features and its variety of patterns and colors, cork is now enjoying extreme popularity. Cork is harvested naturally every nine years from the bark of a Cork Oak tree and is done so without cutting or damaging the tree itself.
Bamboo flooring is more cost-effective than hardwood flooring, more durable and certainly more environmentally friendly. Most wood products are compared with oak and maple in terms of stability and durability. Northern red oak is usually the standard against which other hardwood floors are measured for stability. Stability refers to the natural contraction and expansion of a wood in different climates over time. Bamboo is 50% more stable than red oak.
