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Hardwood Flooring Fundamentals
By Steve Maxwell
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Few homebuilding options remain as perennially popular as hardwood floors. Despite cheaper alternatives that look pretty good, and more expensive choices that promise bullet-proof durability, genuine hardwood maintains its status as one of the kings of the flooring castle for one main reason: It looks classy for a long time. Or, more accurately, it can look classy for a long time. Whether or not the virtue of lasting hardwood beauty becomes a reality depends on getting more than a few installation details right. This is especially true when you’re putting down traditional, finished-on-site hardwood flooring. Here’s a look at the three main installation challenges behind any job, and how to deal with them.
Challenge#1: Dealing With Wood Movement
Unlike most other substances in our lives, solid wood changes shape substantially as its moisture content goes up or down. Wood swells as it picks up moisture, and shrinks as it dries. And this fact matters a great deal in the flooring game since no one likes board-to-board gaps underfoot. Even if you have success in all other areas of hardwood installation, yawning gaps will declare the result a failure. That’s why of all the concerns surrounding hardwood floors, unsightly gaps are the most worrisome. Avoiding this common problem depends on a numerical understanding of the moisture content in your flooring and how to manage it.
The ideal moisture content of hardwood flooring is between 7% to 9% by weight before installation. And since lumber starts at around 25% to 30% M.C. at the sawmill, artificial kiln drying is used to speed the preparation of virtually all hardwood flooring before it’s milled. This process would completely eliminate the problem of flooring gaps except for one fact: all wood soaks up plenty of moisture from the air if given the chance, even after it's been kiln dried. And it doesn’t take much time for that to happen. A month of humid summer weather, for example, is enough to increase the moisture content of kiln-dried floor boards to the point where unacceptable gaps are a distinct possibility during the bone-dry depths of a centrally-heated Canadian winter. That’s why the primary rule of hardwood flooring installation is the assumption that the wood you’ve got is too wet.
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Hardwood Flooring Fundamentals
By Steve Maxwell
|
|
|
Few homebuilding options remain as perennially popular as hardwood floors. Despite cheaper alternatives that look pretty good, and more expensive choices that promise bullet-proof durability, genuine hardwood maintains its status as one of the kings of the flooring castle for one main reason: It looks classy for a long time. Or, more accurately, it can look classy for a long time. Whether or not the virtue of lasting hardwood beauty becomes a reality depends on getting more than a few installation details right. This is especially true when you’re putting down traditional, finished-on-site hardwood flooring. Here’s a look at the three main installation challenges behind any job, and how to deal with them.
Challenge#1: Dealing With Wood Movement
Unlike most other substances in our lives, solid wood changes shape substantially as its moisture content goes up or down. Wood swells as it picks up moisture, and shrinks as it dries. And this fact matters a great deal in the flooring game since no one likes board-to-board gaps underfoot. Even if you have success in all other areas of hardwood installation, yawning gaps will declare the result a failure. That’s why of all the concerns surrounding hardwood floors, unsightly gaps are the most worrisome. Avoiding this common problem depends on a numerical understanding of the moisture content in your flooring and how to manage it.
The ideal moisture content of hardwood flooring is between 7% to 9% by weight before installation. And since lumber starts at around 25% to 30% M.C. at the sawmill, artificial kiln drying is used to speed the preparation of virtually all hardwood flooring before it’s milled. This process would completely eliminate the problem of flooring gaps except for one fact: all wood soaks up plenty of moisture from the air if given the chance, even after it's been kiln dried. And it doesn’t take much time for that to happen. A month of humid summer weather, for example, is enough to increase the moisture content of kiln-dried floor boards to the point where unacceptable gaps are a distinct possibility during the bone-dry depths of a centrally-heated Canadian winter. That’s why the primary rule of hardwood flooring installation is the assumption that the wood you’ve got is too wet. |
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