engineered hardwood flooring

Decreased housing budgets reflects a general trend to increase a home’s efficiency, reduce excess waste and maximise space, Maryland’s Baltimore Sun reports.

According to a survey conducted by the NAHB:

average size of an American house shrank about 100 square feet last year to about 2,400 square feet…the percentage of homes with three or more bathrooms fell for the first time since 1992, while homes with four or more bedrooms declined for the third year in a row.

Ridding your home of needless extras such as game rooms, large en-suite bathrooms and outdoor swimming pools can not only help reduce initial outlay costs, but also cut utility bills and save energy. Concentrating on making better use of the essentials, such as better insulation in windows and doors, smart ways of heating and more modern and effecient appliances, can help save even more money. Also, choosing a good engineered wood floor can be a key factor in the overall appearance of your home. The colour, style and species all help to shape the look you are trying to create.

However, going ‘green’ isn’t always the cheapest option since innovative technology generally comes at a premium and can scare some consumers away, even if they will save money in the long run.

Making smart choices about the essential aspects of your home will always reap the benefits and there hasn’t been a better time to start than now, with Real Oak Floors offering engineered hardwood flooring at reduced prices yet sourcing woods only from sustainable forests.

Available in a range of styles, engineered hardwood flooring can be oiled, lacuqered or even unfinished. Its stability stems from the fact that a top layer of real wood compliments a strong ply-board backing. This helps when installing a wood floor in a difficult area such as over concrete and is also resillient against expansion, shrinking and warping.

Underfloor heating also helps to keep your home warm for less by spreading heating elements strategically across your home.

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We’ve been busy this Christmas updating our wood flooring ranges, and we can proudly present our updated Creative Engineered Flooring Collection.

Our Creative Floor Collection is a bespoke range of engineered wood flooring that aims to give customers a wide choice of extremely high quality engineered boards in finishes that will suit almost any taste. To give you a true picture of the creative flooring we offer we’ve gone to some lengths to make sure the images you see on our site are the closest in colour and texture you will get to the real thing.

Of course, it’s impossible to replicate the style of wood completely, but the following chart should give you a breathtaking overview of the diverse range of engineered wood flooring we offer.

Oiled Creative Floor Collection

The creative oak flooring distressed collection reveals the contrasts and vibrancy of the real wood layer and is available in a range of contrasting dark and light tones.

Discover the depth of a smoked wood floor with dark tones of Campana oak flooring or the contrasting grains of Maranello. If you’re looking to retain the natural tones of the wood then our unfinished floor collection is the right choice. Trevisio is more akin to natural oak while Soleto is richer, almost red in colour.

Distressed, Smoked and Unfinished Oak Flooring

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Although an oak floor can really make a different to your home’s interior and really open up the room, have you ever thought about going a little further and opting for an exotic engineered wood floor? At first, you might think why bother with the extra expense,but the recent introduction of the Real Oak Floors exotic floor collection just shows that you can style your home with a whole new look for as much as any other type of wood species.

Engineered Iroko Flooring

If you want a wood that varies in its tone that delivers a unique yet subtle colour pattern across your floor then Iroko is a fantastic choice. The fact that it is very durable makes it very suitable for a wood floor where there is large amounts of floor traffic or in places where pets or children may traverse the floor regularly. In large expansive areas, the floor is simply breathtaking, hints of toffee-coloured tones will bring out white furniture with elegance.

Engineered Teak Flooring

More stable than Iroko, wooden Teak flooring is a consistently-toned wood that has slightly darker grains giving it a character all of its own. Where oak will deliver a smooth, even tone to your floor, woods such as teak will liven up any minmalistic setting or work very well in a kitchen where you may have a teak kitchen worktop to complement the wood floor.

Engineered Doussie Flooring

Engineered wood boards like Doussie and Sapele give off a distinctive red colour and rate as a fairly hard wood on the Janka Hardness Scale (Doussie: 1810; Sapele: 1510). These two wood are much harder than oak flooring which may make a difference where floor traffic (including high heels!) is concerned.

In fact, you may need to take the hardness of the wood into consideration more if you opt for engineered wood flooring. This type of flooring is generally much thinner than solid wood flooring, although the exotic engineered wood flooring range at Real Oak Floors is 21mm thick, an extremely high quality board that will withstand a lot of use.

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Even though installing a wood floor can be a relatively painless task if you have the right tools and expertise, for the discerning home owner it is essential you forsee any additional circumstances that prevent getting the most out of your hardwood floor. Winter is on its way and for wood flooring this causes a slight problem – a lack of warmth underneath your feet. However, with good planning and these great tips, you’ll be on your way to covering all the bases.

Electric underfloor heating has probably become the most effecient and cost-effective method of heating your floors and can even act as the primary source of heat in your home. Most people, however, may want to combine radiators and underfloor heating as their main sources of heat and doing so can have its benefits.

In this instance, it is much more cost effective to place an underfloor heating system in areas where someone is going to stand for some time. The most obvious place is in the bathroom near the basin, although you need make sure whatever type of wood flooring you use is waterproof.

Going one step further, laying larger areas of underfloor heating where you may reside more frequently, such as a living room will help to make efficient use of heat where it is most needed.

A large amount of good quality engineered flooring should always have the option of electric underfloor heating and should ideally be placed when the engineered hardwood planks are being laid themselves. At this stage it is imperative that you have drawn up a plan your room and where you want the heating system to be placed:

Downstairs flooring plan for underfloor heating. Original flooring plan by designbasics.com

As you can see, all the main areas are covered, catering in places where people will be stationary for a period of time. If you have installed a floating engineered floor in areas such as the garage or porch, you will have a much easier job laying underfloor heating than if the floor was stuck down.

Ovverall, planning your underfloor heating installation is essential to ensure all the areas you need are covered and that you are making the most out of heat dissapation. Engineered wood flooring is a great type of flooring to install during the colder months and will make just as lasting an impression as a solid wood floor.

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Already available in a massive range of sizes, our Creative Wood Flooring collection has a new addition – 240mm widths! Our bespoke engineered creative flooring is unique in its selection of sizes and finishes. Prices start from £26.35.

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When fitting hardwood floor it’s always a good idea to think about how much use (and abuse) it will get. Kitchens and other high volume areas of a house will need flooring designed to withstand sudden high pressure (e.g. drops, high heels, jumping) and water resistance (spilliages etc.).

Unless you are going to lay high quality  Krono laminate flooring, it’s probably a good idea to avoid laying laminates. This flooring type is made of synthetic materials that really won’t hold solid like a real wood floor.

So, in order to prepare yourself for high volumes and tough types of floor traffic, hardwood flooring is the way to go but the type of resistent flooring you go for really depends on your budget. All is not lost, however, thanks to engineered hardwood flooring, a superb choice for ease of laying and attaining a high quality finish.

For those of you who don’t know, engineered boards are made up of multiple layers of wood with the bottom layers usually consisting of poplar wood or birch and the upper layer made of hardwood. Exotic engineered wood flooring is probably one of the thickest engineered planks around with its 21mm hardwood layer. Unlike 6mm (or less) thick boards, you can easily sand and refinish these exotic woods when marked or dented without weaking its structure. In turn, the life servicve of the floor will prolong over many years.

Generally, the thicker the engineered hardwood layer the more resistant it will be to damage.

Popularity: 6% [?]