How to Choose Wooden Flooring for Your Home

Are you giving your home a makeover? Knocking down walls, creating new rooms and selecting paint colours is a tall order, and it doesn’t end there. Once you’ve sorted out everything at eye level, you’ll need to turn to the job sitting right under your nose… the flooring!

If wooden flooring is what you’re after, here’s how to choose the right type for your home.

Real wood flooring

Real wood flooring is precisely what the name suggests – boards of single pieces of wood that are typically around 20mm thick. Sometimes called ‘solid wood’ flooring, this option is great for those wanting to add a desirable ‘selling point’ to their homes as real wood flooring is a fashionable trend right now.

Real wood flooring is typically laid in a tongue and groove style and looks fabulous in areas that get lots of traffic, such as hallways and living areas.

However, there are some problems with it. Firstly, it swells in damp conditions and shrinks in dry ones, so it won’t stay the same over its lifetime.

It is also quite tricky to install so will probably require an expert fitter, and is often the most expensive option for homeowners.

Laminate flooring

At the opposite end of the spectrum is laminate flooring. This type of flooring is a piece of compressed MDF, designed to look realistic by overlaying it with an image of wood (or any other material you’d like to emulate, such as concrete, marble or tile).

Laminate wooden flooring is often laid across entire properties in kitchens, bathrooms and living rooms because it’s an easy surface to clean, is fairly hardwearing and is easy to install.

While this type of wooden flooring is cheap (with prices ranging from around £5 to £50 a square metre), it doesn’t feel like the real thing.

It can wear out over time and can’t be repaired once damaged, and isn’t always a great option if you want to add value to your home.

Engineered wood flooring

Engineered wood flooring is a number of layers of wood (normally three or four) that have been glued together to create a plank that is around 14mm thick.

A real-wood veneer is then placed on top to enable homeowners to sand it back and restore it to its prime if it becomes damaged.

For many homeowners, engineered wooden flooring is perfect as it’s solid, isn’t quite as prone to changes caused by temperature or humidity in the same way that solid wood flooring is (which means it can be used with underfloor heating systems) and can also be nicer to walk on than laminate flooring.

So, while it’s not cheap (£20 to £200 per square metre) it might be worth the investment if you want to lay it in areas of your home that get a lot of traffic or are on display to guests.

If you’re interested in this type of flooring for your home, why not check out engineered wood flooring from Ken’s Yard?

(Disclosure: This is a guest post)

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