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Home > Bob on TV > CBS > The Early Show
The Early Show™
January 28, 2002
Wood Flooring Guide
Traditional hardwood floors have always been a popular choice for homeowners. Today, the range of options is greater than ever. Bob Vila visits The Early Show to take a look at a few of the options currently on the market.
Recovered Select Pine from the Goodwin Heart Pine Company.
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Wood flooring is a popular choice for many reasons. Wood floors don't harbor dust, bacteria or dust mites the way that carpet can. Wood floors come in natural styles, are durable and, when properly sealed and finished, can be cleaned with a wet mop.
Woods such as oak, cherry or fir don't dent as easily as pine, and most gouges can be re-stained to hide the damage. Hardwood floors can be left their natural color or given a stain, ranging from light (blond) to dark (cherry). Simulated wood products, such as laminates, look like wood but are made of synthetics that don't scratch or dent as easily as the real thing. Yet, they offer the same eye appeal as wood, including the grain that defines hard woods. These synthetic floors are particularly well-suited to high traffic areas like kitchens and mud rooms.
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Traditional Unfinished Wood
Standard unfinished hardwood flooring is the most common and often the least expensive option for hardwood floors. Common options include Oak, Beech, Birch, Hard Maple, Hickory/Pecan, and Ash. It can always be found in stock, it's easy to work with and easy to repair, and if properly maintained, it will last a lifetime. Installation of hardwood floors is labor intensive. Care must be taken to assure that the individual boards are properly secured to the sub-floor. Once installed, the unfinished wood needs to be sanded and stained, or coated with a urethane sealer. Strip or plank flooring can be refinished time and time again, which means its original luster can always be brought back to life.
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Traditional Clear White Oak strip flooring with a urethane finish.
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Pre-finished engineered wood flooring from Shaw Hard Surfaces.
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Pre-Finished Wood
Pre-finished wood floors offer some key benefits: longer finish warranties, uniform stain application, and a cleaner indoor environment. Pre-finished wood flooring is often an engineered floor, which means that it is not a solid wood product. Typically, they are assembled of several layers of hardwood veneers. The layers are bonded together to form a single unit. The individual boards are then cut to uniform sizes. Unlike standard wood flooring, pre-finished floors arrive on location stained and sanded. Once installed, they require no additional finish work. There is no dust and clean-up time or cost due to sanding, and no harmful fumes trapped in the home from the application of stains or urethanes.
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Reclaimed Lumber
True Antique Heart Pine has become rare with a steadily diminishing supply. Old-growth longleaf pine, the tree from which Antique Heart Pine comes, is virtually extinct. What was once nearly 95 million acres is now less than 10,000 acres of old-growth longleaf. Today two sources of antique are timbers reclaimed from old buildings or logs recovered from river bottoms.
The high resin content of antique pine enables the wood to turn the rich tone without using chemicals to attain these hues. The color change starts quickly, usually within the first month of installation. New heart pine, on the other hand, tends to stay in the yellow hues because of the lower resin count. It can take up to 30 years for a longleaf pine tree to grow just one inch in diameter. True old growth has very dense grain and often has 15 growth rings per inch or more. This results in a very fine grain, consistent color and a hardness on scale with red oak.
Bamboo Flooring
Bamboo is a very environmentally friendly construction material. Bamboo is a grass rather than a wood. Bamboo grows so fast, (about 24 inches in its first 24 hours) allowing the shoots to be harvested in three to five years. Quality bamboo flooring is usually 25 percent harder than Northern Red Oak and more dimensionally stable, which means floors are less likely to cup or bow as the moisture content of a room changes from season to season.
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Bamboo flooring from Green World Imports.
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Laminate flooring from Formica's Weathered Heirloom Collection in Aged Heart Pine.
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Laminate Flooring
Laminates are made for living. Most people would not know the difference between hardwood and laminate flooring at first glance. They would see the light across the grain and the razor tight joints, but what they are actually seeing is a thin layer of decor paper (a photographic image) under a protective film that is glued and pressed to a high-density backing board. Where hardwood floors are forever being protected from sand and spills and muddy pets, laminates are made to handle the battle of daily life. Laminate flooring material is showing up in many different forms and applications. Hallways, foyers and family rooms, bathrooms and kitchens are ideal for the material. It is durable, easily maintained and relatively inexpensive.
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Most laminate flooring systems are floating, which means they do not fasten to the subfloor with nails or glue. Rather, they have an interlocking system that is glued together. The gluing serves two purposes. It holds the flooring material together, while allowing the subfloor below to move independently of the laminate. The glue also protects the core material from surface moisture.
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