natural stone flooring

The rich look of hardwood floors adds warmth and charm to any room in the home. For centuries people have used wood floors in homes, churches and even stores.

Laminate Flooring is simply a multi-layered; wood based floating floor system offering durability, a wide range of desige options, easy maintenance and affordability.

Another choice you have to make is whether to want a pre-finished or an unfinished hardwood floor that has to be finished in your home. The pre-finished floors offer a wider variety of wood species and saves hours of labor and cleanup. While the unfinished wood floors allow you to have a really custom, job-site finish and a completely smooth, uniform surface. You also get an extended factory finish warranty with pre-finished floors, but not with most job-site finished flooring.

Recent innovations have opened the door for the design community to begin using less traditional materials in residential planning. This demand for unique flooring products, including cork, bamboo, rubber and others, has prompted the retailer to carry or at least have access to a wider range of interesting alternative flooring materials.

Bamboo flooring offers one of the most unique appearances of any floor covering product. However, most people do not know that Bamboo is a "grass" floor rather than a hardwood floor. All bamboo laminated plank flooring is actually harder than Northern Red Oak.

The inherent properties of rubber flooring are durability, natural resiliency and low maintenance. These features have allowed rubber flooring to become an ideal choice for a great many applications.

The process of taking Bamboo from its natural state and manufacturing it into a viable floor covering option is very difficult. The harvested Bamboo is fed through splitting and sizing machinery. The small strips are than planed down to their approximate size. Next, the rough-sized strips are kiln dried down to an 8-10% moisture content. This process can take 5 days, and is the most important step in the manufacturing process.

Through advancements in finish technologies and superior construction techniques manufacturers of hardwood floors are able to produce tougher finishes and more stable products. This means quality engineered hardwood floors can go in any almost room in the home and over a wide variety of subfloors, including dry, fully-cured concrete slabs.

Another popular trend are the handscraped hardwood floors offered by hardwood manufacturers, such as Anderson, Mannington and Mohawk. If you want the rich look and charm of hand-made flooring than you won't want to miss previewing the hand-scraped hardwoods.