WHY WOOD?
As you undertake your building or remodeling project, you may want to consider wood as a possible floor covering. Practical as well as beautiful, and surprisingly affordable, wood floors perhaps more than any other feature in your home, bespeak quality and permanence. Wood floors are tough and durable, but
also for their infinite variety of grain, texture , and color, intrinsically elegant. Interestingly, wood is also intrinsically unstable and may occasionally shrink or expand, but this quality differentiates it from manufactured products lacking its organic beauty and natural practicality.
UPKEEP IS EASY
You probably already know how outdated is the old lament from the 1940's and 1950's about the tedium of waxing and maintaining hardwood floors. The introduction of polyurethane finish in the 1970's not only ended waxing but made wood floors possible where they never were before--to the extent that today, most of our jobs include wood floors in kitchens as well as many other rooms in the house. Maintaining them ordinarily involves no more than an occasional damp mopping.
MORE POPULAR THAN EVER
The popularity of wood floors is not hard to explain, and ease of maintainance is only one reason. The natural grain of the wood incomparably outclasses synthetic, man-made products in beauty. Wood floors are indeed a delight to behold. But they are also practical: the wood is durable and the polyurethane is tough - it's meant to be used! And when it does show wear, it can easily be renewed. (Even if wood floors have been totally neglected, they can still be sanded and refinished to look new.) So when another floor covering is worn out and needs replacement, the wood floor is still looking great--making it, over time, the least expensive as well as the most attractive of floors.
HEALTHY AND RENEWABLE
Besides being an intelligent long-term investment that is both practical and beautiful, wood flooring is a healthy alternative. Unlike carpet, it doesn't harbor mites that exacerbate allergies. And though hard, it is friendlier to your feet, legs and spine than tile is when you stand on it for lengths of time. Wood is also a natural insulator, composed of microscopic hollow cells that create thousands of tiny air pockets. Moreover, wood is a renewable resource. North American woods in particular are readily available - and manufacturers are committed to maintaining a supply, which is good news for the environment. It's also satisfying for us and for our customers to have installed many thousands of square feet of reclaimed wood; you can learn more about reclaimed wood floors in the section Which Wood?.
VARIETY
Wood floors are available in a variety of species and dimensions, making them appropriate for nearly every residential and commercial application. We have traditional domestic woods such as oak, maple, walnut, cherry, fir, pine and hickory. We also use many woods from Latin America, most of which you may never have heard of. We have laid thousands of square feet of many different varieties of eucalyptus from Australia, as well as exotics from Africa and bamboo from Asia. Over seventy-five kinds of real wood are on display at our shop. (For more information see the section Which Wood?.)
Besides choices in species of wood, there are countless stain options for you to choose from, ranging from natural (the most popular), to light or dark brown, to black, white, red, green, and so on, for staining your floor. Moreover, you have a range of finishes available as well, from old-fashioned wax, to rugged oil-base polyurethane, to environmentally-friendly water-base finishes with some, little, or even no sheen.
In addition, we can install your flooring in many different ways. Laying the boards parallel to each other is most common, but we often craft floors combining two or more species of wood either in borders, or sometimes in rich geometric patterns--patterns frequently designed either in our shop or by our coustomers. You can see some of these unique floors in the section Gallery. Remarkably, the strikingly patterned floors we offer are often hrdly any more costly than the standard linear arrangement of flooring.
While generally our work involves solid flooring installed and finished to your specifications at the job site, to complete the range of options we also have available prefinished products to accommodate special subfloors or time-frames. (See the section Solid or Engineered for more information.)
WE WORK WITH YOU
How do you decide which is the right floor for you? We are very experienced working with our customers to sift through all these options, always keeping mind the considerations most important to you such as appearance, price, and durability. And everyone agrees, a visit to our shop where you can see and hold these many beautiful different woods is the best way to experience their variety and decide on the wood floor that's right for you.
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