How to Choose Flooring Type for Your Home

With the huge variety of floor coverings available today, choosing the right type of floors for your home is not an easy task. It often depends on your personal priorities, for instance, some may prefer functionality and others may prioritize the style. In this article, we will tell you about the different types of floors and how to choose the best among them.

Solid Wood Flooring

Solid wood floors are made from solid timber, which is typically sawn into planks. They usually come in around 15mm to 20mm thickness. Solid wood flooring is available in several species, such as walnut, ash and oak, where oak is by far the most popular, mainly due to its durability and appearance. Solid oak flooring can be bought both as a prefinished (lacquered or oiled) or unfinished – with not protective sealant on tom. If you decide to go for the latter option, once you are ready with the solid oak installation, you would need to do floor sealing which can be either varnishing or oiling it.

The advantage of fitting unfinished hardwood flooring is that you can also staining to achieve your desired colour and shade that would best match your interior. Nevertheless, bear in mind that installation of unfinished flooring might be a more expensive option as it requires additional processing after the floor installation.  In addition, hardwood floor fitting is a very durable option as solid wood floorboards are usually either nailed down or glued down to the subfloor, making it a very stable floor covering. Furthermore, solid wood sanding can be done several times, allowing you to maintain a renewed and appealing look on your floors for many years.

Engineered Wood Flooring

Compared to solid wooden flooring, engineered wood flooring has a much higher tolerance to moisture variations, mainly due to their structure. Engineered floors consist of a top layer of natural wood and sublayers of high-density fibreboard providing a stable backing. This makes the engineered floorboard very stable and at the same time resistant to moisture as the backing protects the wood top layer. In addition, most engineered floorings, particularly those that are 14 mm thick can be installed as floating with the use of various types of click installation systems, ensuring a stable bond between the floorboards without the need of gluing down or nailing down to the subfloor. This allows for fitting of wood floor underlays for more effective moisture and sound insulation. The only downside of the engineered wood floors in comparison to solid wood is that they have limited sanding capacity and can be sanded only once if the top layer is 3mm thick or twice if the top layer is 6mm. Some of the leading manufacturers of engineered flooring today include Boen, Kahrs, Xylo, QuickStep and others producing a very high quality of floors with exceptiponal appearance and durability.

Laminate flooring

There are various reasons for choosing laminate flooring, including that they are cost effective, easy to clean and maintain and offer a beautiful appearance, often mimicking natural wood or stone. Laminate floors are very hygienic as they do not capture any dust or dirt like carpets do and therefore, they are very easy to clean with the use of a mop and laminate floor cleaner. There are some exquisite laminate products on the market today such as QuickStep Laminates, which have been designed not just to imitate the appearance of natural products such as wood, but also with a very high quality, including scratch resistance and moisture resistance. Similarly to engineered floors, laminates are easy to install as flooring floors, allowing the installation of underlays for moisture and sound insulation. The disadvantage of laminate floors, however, is that they cannot be sanded or repaired – once damaged, laminate floors need to be completely replaced.

Luxury Vinyl Tiles

Luxury Vinyl Tiles, simply known as LVT, have exceptional waterproofing properties and scratch resistance surfaces making them suitable for any room in your house. The great advantage of LVT is that they are made up of thin layers, which gives it flexibility and durability. They are available in a wide variety of different effects, making it a fantastic choice. They are very easy to clean and maintain, ensuring a clean and healthy environment.

There are different types of floors available in the market. Before choosing floor covering for your home, you need to consider the above properties carefully to ensure that your floors match your needs best.