Wood flooring is a popular feature in many homes for it’s beauty, warmth and functionality. Today, wood flooring refers to a large variety of flooring types.

The Two Main Types of Wood Flooring

The simple term, “Wood flooring” refers to any product manufactured from timber that is designed for use as flooring, either structural or aesthetic. Even bamboo flooring is often considered a wood floor, although it is not manufactured from timber, but a grass.

Solid Wood

Solid hardwood floors come in a wide range of dimensions and styles, with each plank made of solid wood and milled from a single piece of timber. Solid hardwood floors were originally used for structural purposes, being installed perpendicular to the wooden support beams of a building. Modern construction techniques now rarely use wood building frames and solid hardwood floors are used almost exclusively for their appearance.

For flooring, solid wood has many limitations due to the natural characteristics of wood. Expansion and contraction of wood from moisture and temperature fluctuation puts many dimensional restrictions on solid wood floors. Typically, 5″ wide and 3/4″ thick boards are the largest that can be manufactured from solid wood without compromising the structure of the flooring (some manufacturers produce wider boards using proprietary milling techniques). There is, however, no standard size which will perform well in every environment. For contemporary construction techniques, the most significant characteristic of solid wood floors is that they are not recommended to be installed directly over concrete.

Engineered Wood Flooring

Engineered wood flooring is comprised of two or more layers of wood in the form of a plank. The top layer (lamella) is the wood that is visible when the flooring is installed, and is adhered to the core (or sub-strait) which provides the stability.

Laminate, vinyl and veneer floors are often confused with engineered wood floors – laminate uses an image of wood on its surface, vinyl is plastic formed to look like wood, and veneer uses a thin layer of wood with a core that could be one of a number of different composite wood products (most commonly, high density fibreboard).

There are two different approaches to engineered wood flooring manufacturing:

1) Wood ply construction (”sandwich core”): Uses multiple thin plies of wood adhered together. The wood grain of each ply runs perpendicular to the ply below it. Stability is attained from using thin layers of wood that have little to no reaction to climatic change. The wood is further stabilized due to equal pressure being exerted lengthwise and widthwise from the plies running perpendicular to each other.

2) Finger core construction: Finger core engineered wood floors are made of small pieces of milled timber that run perpendicular to the top layer (lamella) of wood. They can be 2-ply or 3-ply, depending on their intended use. If it is three ply, the third ply is often plywood that runs parallel to the lamella. Stability is gained through the grains running perpendicular to each other, and the expansion and contraction of wood is reduced and relegated to the middle ply, stopping the floor from gapping or cupping.

Engineered wood is the most common type of wood flooring used globally, probably due to it’s durability and economy. North America is the only continent that has a larger solid wood market than engineered, although engineered wood is quickly catching up in market share.

In the next article, we’ll compare Solid Wood with Engineered Wood.

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