Wooden floors

 My sister has just finished ripping up the fitted carpets in her house and restoring the wooden floors underneath. In the process, they found that some pipes had been laid under the floor and patched over, necessitating replacing some of the floor boards. This can be quite a challenge to match the wood type, especially if the building is quite old. But this led me to thinking about installing a new wooden floor into an existing home.

Wooden floors are very beautiful and give a warm feeling to any room, but there are a few things that you need to know before installing them. The first thing is that there are two types of wood: hardwood such as teak, mahogany and meranti, as well as the various woods commonly used for furniture such as oak. The other wood type is classed as softwood, mostly from coniferous trees such as pine or deal, the two most prevalent being Oregon Pine and Baltic Deal. Oregon is usually slightly pink, whereas Baltic Deal is more yellow. 

A Baltic Deal floor

The softwoods, as their classification suggests, are softer than the hardwoods used for construction, because they have grown quicker and have a coarser grain. This means that they are more susceptible to scratching and general wear, and cannot be sanded down as many times as a hardwood. This is because they have a tongue and groove jointing system, and the sanding quite soon grinds down to the "tongue" causing the joint to fail. This is especially a problem if it is a suspended floor, supported by timber joists as is common on the ground floor of a building.

A tongue and groove floor on timber joists

 Hardwood floors tend to be much more durable and resistant to scratching as they have a much finer grain. These are often found as parquet flooring, which is made up of small blocks, 23x8cm (9x3 inches) that can  be laid in a variety of patterns. In my flat, these have a herringbone pattern with an orthogonal layout around the perimeter of the rooms.

Parquet flooring

The blocks are laid directly onto the concrete floor, usually with a bitumen adhesive which provides a waterproof barrier to prevent rising damp that would cause the wood to rot. Hardwood floors are quite expensive, but the blocks can sometimes be acquired second hand when people are replacing it. Because they are very resilient, they can be very successfully sanded down and sealed or varnished.

An important consideration if you want to install wooden floors into an existing home is what the existing finish is in the room. If you are replacing carpet or vinyl tile, you will have a problem where the wooden floor meets another finish, as the wood will tend to be thicker, producing a small step at the junction which can be really hazardous. If the original floor is ceramic tile, this usually gives much more flexibility, as the cement screed can be removed along with the tiles, giving enough depth for the two floor finishes to align in doorways.

This parquet floor is exactly level with a grano bathroom floor

An alternative to parquet or tongue and groove boarding, and much more affordable, is laminate flooring. This is made from an extremely thin layer of hardwood, so it can replace a carpet or vinyl floor without a level change where it meets another finish. Laminate flooring cannot be sanded , so if it gets badly scuffed or damaged in any other way, it needs to be replaced. It is also not very resilient to water other than for cleaning: if you have a flood, the boards will warp. 

An example of laminate flooring

In general, it is not a good idea to use wooden floors of any type for bathrooms, as the atmosphere is just too moist and the chances of wet feet, spills or flooding are too great. Here it is better to use tiles or grano, which is a very durable concrete screed, often tinted, and polished to a very smooth finish.