A floor color you can call your own

A floor color you can call your own

Start designing your room from the ground up. Wood floors can add beauty and value to any home. With wood care products your floors will be durable and beautiful.

What Type of a Wood Floor is Best for My Kitchen?

Wood Species
Go with the hardest species you can find. Oak and ash are some of the strongest domestic wood species used in the manufacture of wood floors. Rich grain and exquisite texture of these species will not only make the floor look beautiful and unique, but also help disguise small dents and scratches that are bound to occur over time.

Surface Texture
Wood floors with a light texture and a polished finish are gorgeous, but will they look just as spotlessly perfect after a few pots, pans, and jars have been dropped on your floor? Probably not, which is why highly textured wood species and wire brushed finishes work so well in kitchens and other high trafficked areas. If anything, the floor only ends up looking better over time!

  • Installing Hardwood Flooring In a Kitchen
    In a kitchen, you want to make sure that you purchase a very dense, durable hardwood, and stay away from softwood floors that will be more prone to water damage and staining issues.

  • Finish Options for Natural Wood Flooring
    The protective coat created by this process is much more potent than anything that can be applied on site and can last up to five times longer than traditional self-applied finishes.

  • Maintaining Hardwood Floors In a Kitchen
    The most important thing that you can do to maintain your hardwood kitchen floors is to keep constant vigilance over them. You can test the finish on the floor by pouring a very small amount of water on it in some of the most highly trafficked areas. If it beads up the finish is fine.

  • How To Care for a Hardwood Floor
    The drawback is that the refinishing process is a big, messy job. It involves taking almost everything out of the kitchen and then bringing in big, loud equipment that sends sawdust flying through the air in every direction.

  • The Advantages of Hardwood In Kitchens
    Hardwood provides you with a softer, more yielding surface to stand on than most tile and hard surface flooring options. This also makes it less likely that items will shatter if accidentally dropped.

  • Floods and Leaks in Kitchens
    Unfortunately, each utensil that ties into the plumbing of your house, is a potential disaster waiting to happen. Small leaks can cause standing puddles, that will wear through the finish and seep down cracks to rot the floor from within.​​

Can You Put Hardwood Floors Over Concrete?

Details
Category: Home improvement advices
Eventually, humid environments, such as those found in basements, cause wood floors to buckle, cup, warp or crack because wood expands and contracts with changes in humidity levels. Before building wood floors over a concrete slab, take some extra steps and precautions suggested by driveway concrete contractors in Akron, OH.
Checking Moisture
Before they pour a concrete slab, builders usually lay down a vapor barrier. Concrete appears to wick water easily, and much of the moisture is kept back by the barrier. Try cutting a polyethylene plastic 12-inch-by-12-inch sheet and taping it to the slab. Make sure that the edges are covered completely with duct tape. For about 24 hours, leave the plastic in place. The plastic sheet should still be clear after that time. No water droplets or clouds that suggest the presence of moisture should be seen. You can add wood over the concrete slab, if the plastic is clear.
Barrier Moisture
You will need additional protection from water vapor before laying a wood floor, despite a good moisture check and the existence of an underground moisture barrier. One way of providing the moisture barrier is sheets of 6-mil thick polyethylene plastic, overlapped with taped seams. Paint the slab with a moisture sealant for a second choice. Home centers store a choice of brands of sealers as well as 6-mil plastic rolls.
Subfloor board
One installation technique is installing a subfloor over the concrete slab. Over the moisture barrier, create a subfloor with sheets of 3/4-inch pressure-treated plywood. Directly on top of the pressure-treated plywood, nail wood flooring planks. You may also lay down lengths over the moisture barrier of pressure-treated, 2-inch-by-4-inch studs. These studs, on top of which you nail sheets of 3/4-inch plywood, work similarly to floor joists. The studs hold the wood flooring planks farther away from the slab and reduce the quantity of wood that remains in immediate, continuous contact with concrete.
Adhesive
A second strategy for installation is to glue wood flooring planks to the slab. In this scenario, with a moisture sealant, paint a waterproof membrane over the slab, then add a specially prepared adhesive. At home centers and flooring stores, the glue is available. This adhesive dries quickly, which means you have to work quickly. With this strategy, you do not need to be nailed. Using a rubber mallet to tap the wood planks in place, which sets them into the adhesive and forces the tongue of one plank into the groove of another.