Real Oak Floors Wood Floor Blog

Have you been over to the real oak floors website lately? If not then you should! You may remember our last blog post where we told you they had just put up a range of Atkinson Kirby wooden flooring, well things have been expanding further since then!

If your looking for something a little different to wood flooring then why not look at the brand new range of stainless steel flooring! There is a wide range covering many different innovative designs and it has been developed to meet the high standards of residential and commercial markets. The main benefits of stainless steel flooring are that it is very easy to clean and very hard wearing, in fact this flooring is virtually indestructible!

In other news if your looking for something to complement your oak flooring very well in the kitchen then real oak floors have just cut the prices yet again on there oak worktops to clear! These worktops are now selling from £100 so get in there quick because at this price there not going to last much longer!

There is also now a few new sections to look at! There is now a new flooring products section so rather than hunting down the new ones you can now look in one place to see whats fresh on the market!

If your in need of skirting, architrave or door frames then take a look at the range of veneered skirting at real oak floors! They have skirting available in profiles such as Ogee, Torus and Pencil Round. Vennered adjustable width door casings are available either standard of fire resistant! Mould resistant veneered bullnosed window boards are available in three different depths.

The range of atkinson kirby flooring covers both solid and engineered wood flooring with options of being supplied unfinished, oiled in a great choice of colours or fumed and oiled. These floors are of the highest quality and are available in a range of different widths.

These wood worktops come pre-oiled with one coat of oil to protect from marks during installation. A simple maintenance oil is then required after fitting to seal the oak worktops fully. Discounts are available for trade and bulk orders of oak worktops!

3 Metre Oak Worktop Discounts!

Savings are available for bulk orders of our 3 Metre oak worktops the more purchased the bigger the saving!

• 1 -2 £150 each + VAT
• 3 -5 £140 each + VAT
• 6 -10 £130 each + VAT
• 11+ £120 each + VAT

Real Oak Floors most popular range of Oak Worktops are natural oiled with the excellent Woca oils (colour code 101) and available in two great convenient sizes.

• 38 x 600 x 3000mm
• 38 x 600 x 4000mm

These high quality wood worktops are available now through the Real Oak Floors website or you can contact a member of the sales team. Discounts are available for trade and bulk orders. To view the complete range of worktops come by the Real Oak Floors site now!

Samples are available if you would like to see the quality of the oak and the finish but you will not be disappointed!

If your looking for wood flooring then real oak floors have all you are looking for! Our flooring range covers both engineered wood flooring which is ideal for use with underfloor heating and solid wood flooring. Of course our floors are available finished with a wide range of colour oils to suit your room. You can have your floor supplied unfinished which leaves you to finish it to your desire.

Our oak flooring is our speciality with the range covering narrow and wide plank boards, finished, unfinished, rustic, smoked, bevelled, unbevelled and much more!

The range of wooden doors at real oak floors is always expanding and improving. The very popular selection of Oak Doors comes in many different styles and types such as Internal and External and even Fire Check! They also have wooden flooring and oak skirting to match the finish of the doors.

For all your flooring needs get in touch with real oak floors!

You may think that Osmo colour oils are only useful for use on wood flooring, fact is it can be used in most situations such as skirting, architraves and mouldings. The famous Frauenkirche church in Dresden had it’s seats stained with a honey colour Osmo colour oil. Here at real oak floors we can supply some of our wood doors unfinished which means you can finish them with your own choice of colour from our extensive range.

The Frauenkirche in Dresden was built in the years 1726 – 1743. The building was in need of a total rebuild as it was destroyed during the second world war, even the wood flooring was completely destroyed! It has taken many many years to restore the church to it’s former glory, in fact well over fifteen years with a sponsored investment of over 100 million euro’s. The restoration project needed expert carpenters to bring it back to it’s former glory as they were the only ones with the skills needed to do the job and do the job to the standard it needed to be done! In the end over 80 carpenters applied for the job of restoring the church seats. Amongst those that applied was Sebastian Schultz, an experienced carpenter from Chemnitz, Germany. Chemnitz stood out from all the other applicants as he had researched in depth the details of the original furniture. His research had found that regional fur from Saxonia and Bohemia has been used instead of Douglas fir as was specified. As a result of this he and his team sealed the deal and got the contract.

Schultz knew why this fir wood was used for the church seats. It was because the properties of the fir wood were ideally suited to the job. Fir wood is light, making it very easy to bend, has a low resin count and grows very straight. It also has an attenuating affect which reduces resonance.

For the job at hand Schultz and his team processed 400 cubic meters of fir wood which took them a total of three years to process ready for the church.

The rampart totalled 1, 200 square meters and the seats totalled 3, 800 a total of 5, 000
square meters of wood, all of which was hand-planed and finished.

Once the seats were constructed they were treated with products from Osmo. Eighty other samples from different products were tested before this procedure but in the end they settled on the Osmo products. Firstly the seats were stained a honey colour matching that of the original seats and then finished using Osmo Wood Wax. It took 25 cans of the Osmo product each of which contained 25 litres to complete the job a total of 625 litres!

Maintenance wise the seats have only had treatment once in the last two years. Fact is Osmo maintenance products should be used once every three months in high traffic areas such as the church or any other high traffic area such as on an oak flooring installation in the public domain.

The project was a success with the wooden seats replicated as close to the originals as they
possibly could be. Schultz and his team had achieved what they had set out to do. This was thanks not only to their expert skills but also to their knowledge and background research they had done. Last of all the job could not be done without the materials that they possessed such as the finish supplied by Osmo and the locally sourced wood.

Not Checking Moisture

Moisture is the number one cause of problems when it comes to installing wooden flooring. With this in mind it need not be, take the proper procedure to handle it and it will not be a problem. The problem is that a lot of flooring installers do not take this into consideration.

What quite often happens is that wood flooring is delivered straight to the job site in the winter. The flooring came from a reputable supplier and the wood was stored in a climate-controlled warehouse. After arriving at the job site delays happen and the wood ends up sitting around for a while. Not knowing the affects on solid wood flooring the temperature is increased by the heating in the building. The flooring is fitted and everything is fine, the next winter the customer rings to say that the flooring has gaps between the boards.

The cause of the problem is that the flooring acclimated to the conditions of winter when it first arrived, when it then acclimated to the hot summer humidity it swelled up and the edges of the board was damaged, the next winter the swelling reduced and the gaps were much larger than they should be.

Prevention

The best way to avoid this happening is to install the flooring when the moisture content is at a good medium, between the two seasons. The other way to solve the problem would be to not nail the flooring as tight as you normally would and leave “washer rows” to allow some swelling in the winter months without damaging the flooring.

• Make sure any controllable moisture affective work on the house has been completed such as installation of windows and doors.
• Measure the temperature at the job site. It should be at what is considered as normal living conditions.
• Make sure that gutters are in place and correctly installed so that all water drainage is going to go away from the house and not to the foundations as this will increase the moisture.
• Use a good moisture retarder for your wood flooring. If moisture is of real concern to you an engineered wood flooring may be of better suit to you as it is a
  lot more tolerant to heat and moisture changes.

Unprepared Subfloor

Subfloors should be clean, flat and dry. Not doing so can lead to many problems with the flooring its self. These problems can be seen as loose flooring, squeaky joints, deflection and uneven surface.

The dry part of the Subfloor equations come from the moisture content in the air as discussed in the earlier point “check moisture”. The clean part means that all debris and general dirt from the work site must be clean and cleared away from the subfloor and also that anything that may interfere with the adhesive that is going to be used with the flooring is cleaned off. The floor must be flat to industry standards, subfloors that are not flat enough should be flattened before the flooring is installed. Many problems stem from
using an inappropriate sub floor for the flooring used, it is crucial to get this right the first time!

Rushing into it

The main aim of this point is to get across that you should not jump straight into the job and start laying the flooring straight away. Take the time to plan out the job exactly.

While it may work for some to just start laying the flooring straight away it can cause major cosmetic problems. As you move from room to room angles can change as rooms are never perfectly square this leads to crooked flooring spreading through the rooms, a slight change in angle from the required 90 can have major consequences leading trouble for the fitters having to trim down flooring and as mentioned earlier the cosmetics of the flooring will be harmed.

Bad Racking

There are many many mistakes that are commonly made when racking flooring here are some common mistakes that are commonly made.

• End joints being too close together is one of them, the ends of the boards should be at least three times the width of the flooring apart.
• H-Joints happen when end rows line up with one row between them.
• Lightning Bolts/Stairsteps are joints that happen in the flooring in even steps for a number of neighboring planks.
  This often happens when flooring is supplied in even lengths.

A common mistake to make when racking is not to look at the bigger picture of how the floor is panning out and likely to look when it is finished in the current state. This does not just mean the problems described above but it also means observing the wood that is getting laid, for example light and dark planks, after all wood flooring is not going to be perfectly the same since its wood, but who would want it to be anyway.

Since variations can happen between packs it is often a good idea to open up a few packs before you rack and use them at the same time using planks from each box to get some variation.

Not nailing enough

Not nailing the floor is a common problem with some floor fitters, often they may only put a few nails in per board or even only nail every other board. Saving cost is most likely their reasoning as the customer can’t exactly see the difference straight away or even see the nails them selves a lot of the time.

The short fall of doing things this way is that the wood flooring
will be loose, which will allow them to move around and make a lot of noise when they are walked on.

There is a flip side of this which is of course adding too many nails which can cause cracked
tongues and also loose floors this is a problem in oak flooring or any flooring for that matter. The basic rules to nailing is that there should be a minimum of two fasteners per board and that each fastener should be 1 to three inches from the end of the board for. Standard strip flooring the fastening space should be around every 8 to 10 inches and every 4 inches for plank flooring.

The Queen walked on WOCA oiled flooring

The Eurostar is a train of up-to-date design and performance. It competes well with any of the airlines uniting Europe. So its new St Pancras International Terminal was built in luxurious fashion comparable to airport standards.

For the flooring in the Eurostar departure and arrival halls, the 800-million-pound project used approximately 6, 000sqm of FSC accredited solid Jatoba wood flooring which is quite likely to be the largest, single space, solid wood flooring installation in the UK in 2007.

The architects chose to use surface treatments and maintenance products manufactured and supplied by WOCA in Denmark. The project thereby also sets a new quality standard for wood floor finishing in Europe.

On November 6^th, 2007, Her Majesty the Queen opened the new St Pancras International Terminal in London. Queen Elisabeth II. Highlighted the importance of attention to detail and the quality of the completed terminal through which millions of people are expected to pass each year.

WOCA’s contribution
WOCA Denmark (known in Denmark as Trip Trap) is one of the world’s leading suppliers of real wood flooring treatment and maintenance products, in particular for heavy traffic projects such as St Pancras International. Before WOCA became the surface finish supplier, the architect team visited Copenhagen Airport with the design team, where a similar floor has been in service for nearly two decades, and which has been treated with the WOCA oxidising oils, and has been since maintained successfully using a variety of WOCA maintenance products, speciality chosen to meet the arduous traffic conditions.

WOCA UK, with the support from its Danish technical teams, and the UK oiled floor treatment specialists worked with the experience from Copenhagen Airport, and formulated an oil treatment and protection, and maintenance procedures for meeting the needs of the St Pancras project.

Surface treatment at St Pancras
After the solid FSC Jatoba solid wood floor had been machined to the customers exact specifications, and fitted. The ladder bordered patterned floor was belt sanded with 100 grit abrasion. The cross beams were then hand abraded to eliminate sanding marks and to achieve the fine finish required on the cross beams. Then two coats of High Solid natural WOCA Master Oil were applied, and finished off with the final coat of WOCA Maintenance Oil. The high quality finish demanded on this prestigious project required the development of a unique oiling and buffering technique using Dane Care special discs on the 2^nd and 3^rd wet coat to produce the fine, hard wearing quality finish.

Inevitably there were several weeks between the final floor finishing work and the opening date, and given that other trades were on the floor until the last minute, a complete re-oiling became necessary to achieve a perfect finish. So another WOCA innovation was introduced, which is the unique WOCA oil refresher product, applied the same way as traditional wood floor WOCA master soap, but having a two in one ability to remove the dirt from the surface and at the same both restore the floors natural appearance and ensure the appropriate protection.

The team was able to hand over the completed Jatoba flooring, dust free and in perfect condition in time for the Queen’s arrival. According to the WOCA team it was tremendous to see and hear her majesty confirm in her speech, how impressed she was with the attention to detail, after she saw and walked around the completed new St Pancras International terminal.

WOCA Denmark, of course, has also developed the future maintenance procedures for the project. With the use of the WOCA formula, the railway station floor will be perfectly maintained and remain in good condition and appearance for decades to come.

If you are looking to invest in quality wood flooring for 2008 look no further! Our range of engineered wood flooring is always expanding and improving as is our range of solid wood flooring. Take a browse through our massive range and you are sure to find what you are looking for if not more. Our oak flooring range covers the ever popular extra wide plank boards available in a range of finishes such as oiled in black white or natural or even supplied unfinished leaving you to finish the board as you wish. As always you are welcome to order a sample of our flooring before you make your purchase.