The 5 Most Baffling Things About Wood Flooring

Wood flooring is highly revered by homeowners. With its warm feel even in winter and its variegated appearance, few other types of flooring materials can match it.

But as with any other organic material, wood flooring can often have a mind of its own. Let's look at the 5 most baffling things about wood flooring.

1. Expansion and Contraction - Wood flooring picks up moisture from the air and expands or contracts accordingly. If the flooring is not installed with the proper spacing between boards, the flooring will buckle and may need to be re-installed.
2. Harder Than Other Materials - Pine is a soft wood. But on the high end of the Janka hardness scale, we find flooring materials such as Brazilian cherry and walnut--effectively harder than any other types of flooring you can install.
3. May Not Be 100% Wood - Engineered wood flooring looks remarkably like solid hardwood, but it isn't. It's actually dimensionally-stable, plywood-like wood with a thin veneer of hardwood on top.
4. Replacing Individual Boards - Pros can do this, but few homeowners can. If you have a cracked or split board in an already-installed wood floor, it is possible to excise that one board and replace it. It's an art form, and requires a skilled hand to do this.
5. In a Flood, Wood Flooring Can Be Saved - Images of post-Katrina New Orleans showed stacks of ripped out wood flooring on the streets for waste pickup. But if you catch the flooded wood flooring in time, you can save it and restore it to like-new condition.