Wood Floor For Shop

You just want a wood floor for your shop. You want it basic and you want it cheap. But you keep coming up empty.

Your "No and Maybe" Options

• OSB: Orient strand board, that amalgam of resin-bound wood chips, is a cheap and dense option for your shop floor. But it chips off easily and swells with prolonged contact to moisture. Not only that, the rough surface is hard to sweep. OSB is good only as a sub-surface for other flooring. Not recommended.
• Plywood: Plywood is a stronger and more dependable choice than OSB. Bad part is the splintering. Recommended for areas of heavy use (storage of lawn mowers, shovels, sledges, etc.), but not for a wood shop. Maybe.
• Pre-Finished Wood Flooring: This expensive option, usually $3.25 and up, is better suited for living areas than a shop. The multi-layer urethane finish peels off like onion skin when dented. At one time, if you wanted solid hardwood, you got it unfinished and it was your responsibility to finish. Then, better techniques evolved for pre-finishing wood flooring. Urethane-based coatings meant that manufacturers could impregnate the wood with a nearly shell-like finish, enabling the finishing process to happen in a factory, not your home. If someone handed you free pre-finished flooring or you got it extremely cheap, why not? Otherwise, there are far cheaper options below.
• Engineered Wood Flooring: Eliminate any type of engineered wood from your thoughts. Engineered wood's thin, top wood veneer isn't the best protection against falling hammers. Expensive and a poor choice. No.
• Laminate: Laminate isn't wood; it only looks like wood. Slippery and easily damaged. No.

Yes: Rustic Grade and Utility Grade

Lower grades of hardwood flooring may be best suited for your shop. They straddle the line between cheap/rough and nice/acceptable. In the end, it's all a matter of personal preferences and needs.

Rustic Grade Hardwood Flooring

Rustic hardwood isn't the cheapest of the bunch. But its surface is perfect for a shop. It can be sanded and sealed, and it's smooth enough that lost nuts and washers can easily be found. With its low number of openings and knot-holes, it sweeps off well.

Cabin-, Tavern-, or Utility-Grade Hardwood Flooring

This flooring goes by several different names; in any case, it is a lower grade of hardwood than rustic-grade. Pros

• Rock-bottom cheap (but remember to factor the unusable boards into the price).
• Unfinished--keep it raw or finish it the way you like it.

Cons These defects are part and parcel of any utility grade wood flooring:

• Closed knots, but in great numbers.
• Open knots.
• Broken-off tongues.
• Minor splits.
• Boards that are excessively short.
• Burn marks from the saw.
• High rate of unusable boards--up to 20%.

Also, utility grade wood floor may need to be special-ordered.

Sources

Lumber Liquidators supplies rustic- and utility-grade oak flooring for shop that runs between $1-$2 per square foot (July 2011). It does come with the defects listed above, plus blue marks that buyers find difficult to remove. Still, the product is relative to its price and application, so it gets good marks from buyers.

Hurst Hardwoods supplies unfinished red oak in short boards for around the same price as Lumber Liquidators. Check out the "Contractors Specials" on their site.

Moving away from oak, another utility grade flooring for shop is Lumber Liquidators' Clover Lea Pine. Pine, while softer than oak, allows for the manual face-nailing that you would not be able to do with oak. The chief value of this pine is that the boards come in eight-foot lengths; thus, less piecing together of small boards.