A Quick Briefing in Wide Plank Flooring from an Industry Veteran

If you want to slap down any old hardwood flooring, it’s not too hard. Run over to The Home Depot, throw a few boxes of Bruce Red Oak in the back of your truck, and call up a floor installer. But what if you want higher quality hardwood flooring? Can you even get it locally? And the question remains: What is “higher quality” hardwood flooring?

In this instance, you will need to bypass that Lumber Liquidator retail store down the street and do a little legwork to find a custom hardwood flooring company. In other words, you’re doing your research online and by phone, you probably won’t find a retail store anywhere near you—unless you live in a real hotbed of hardwood flooring, like New England.

Consumer Interest in Wide Plank Flooring

Al Kellogg, of Kellogg Hardwood Lumber, has been in the business for thirty-five years and has seen fashions come and go. “Hardwood is perfect for the recent interest homeowners have in reducing dust and mold in their houses,” he notes.

Another trend that plays into company: wide-plank flooring. Even though Kellogg has sold wide-plank flooring for most of those thirty-five years, he has seen a definite surge in interest in the last fifteen or twenty years. If you want a simple definition of “custom flooring company,” look at this:

Kellogg sells certain species, like red oak, in widths up to twelve inches and greater. Pine, too, is available in nearly-one-foot widths, and you will even find white oak coming in sixteen inch widths.

Obviously not something you’ll pick up at Lowe’s.

Wide Plank Flooring: Longer, Too

Another advantage of purchasing custom flooring is that you can get longer planks. “The average commodity floor [from a store like Lumber Liquidators] is called box plank,” says Kellogg. “Box plank comes in five feet, six feet, and other short lengths, also called nested bundles.”

These longer planks lengths have nothing to do with making the job easier for the floor installer. For one thing, longer planks reduce the number of seams in your flooring. More seams mean more cracks for dirt to hide.

More importantly says Kellogg, “Having all short planks gives your floor a mosaic look, a tile look. But with longer planks you reduce or eliminate that mosaic look.”

Should you have a twelve or fourteen foot long room, it’s even possible to have planks running the entire length: zero seams. It’s interesting to note that wider planks must be glued down with adhesives (not glue), because adhesives flex with movement in the flooring that happens with the seasons.

“It’s a basic type of adhesive,” says Kellogg, “almost like Liquid Nails.”