Flooring: Hardwood Laminate, Bamboo, Wood, Cork and more

Use our Floor Finder Tool, or select from these product categories:

• Bamboo Flooring

• Cork Flooring

• Hardwood Floors

• Laminate Flooring

• More Decking

Flooring articles you my find helpful:

• Brand Wars: Hardwood Floors Compared
• Ceramic Tile
• Ceramic or Natural Stone Floor Tile
• Hardwood Flooring: Starter Guide
• LINOLEUM FLOORING
• Pergo Vs. The World
• Shopping for Pre-finished Wood for Flooring
• VINYL FLOORING

Our top picks for Flooring How-To Books

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Flooring is one of the most visible finish surfaces in a home, and serves to unify the entire interior design. With this in mind, this web site shows the many ways in which flooring can enhance the appearance and function of a home. This vendor introduces all types of flooring, discussing their merits and limitations. On this site you will find ceramic tile, terrazo, natural stone, terra cotta, hardwood, wood laminate, floating plank, carpet, vinyl sheet, resilient tiles, cork, carpet tiles, leather, and the new plastic laminates. In addition, you will learn how to repair problems with all types of flooring, how to soundproof and insulate floors, how to refinish hardwood floors, and how to create decorative paint finishes on wood floors.

Our books selection includes may excellent titles to help you learn the basics of flooring. Here's and excerpt from one of these books:

Hardwood Floors

Laying, sanding, and finishing

Nothing compares to the warmth and durability of a beautifully finished hardwood floor. With Don Bollinger's help, you will be able to install a strip, plank or parquet floor with professional results--and then preserve it with a rich finish.

You don't need flooring experience, and the tools needed can be rented locally. Using crisp photographs and drawings, Bollinger goes step by step through the process. He explains how to estimate materials, select the right kind of wood, prepare the subfloor and achieve a blemish-free finish for an old or new floor. Bollinger also gives you numerous tips and tricks and sources of supply.

Since the early 1980s, wood flooring has undergone a phenomenal resurgence in popularity, both for residential and commercial construction. To those of us in the flooring business, this comes as no surprise; for even though other materials may be cheaper or faster to install, wood retains a beauty, warmth and durability that's hard to match.
In one form or another, wood flooring has been afoot for centuries but in some ways, it's just now in its heyday. Because home buyers have become discerning enough to insist on wood flooring, the companies that make it have introduced flooring in unprecedented variety. As recently as a decade ago, oak strip flooring was the standard, if rather limited, fare. Today, you can buy flooring in dozens of species, and not just strip flooring, either, but in the wide planks once found only in well-preserved period homes. If you can't find the strip or plank flooring to suit you, it's a simple matter to have flooring made to order. Parquet flooring, which was hard to come by during the 1960s, is once again available in wide variety. Along with the flooring have come new finishes that are faster to apply and more durable than the coatings they replace.

All of this means that it's now more practical than ever for the owner-builder to install a new floor or to refurbish an old one. Note that I said "practical" and not "easy." I don't for an instant pretend that flooring is easy. Carting bundles of flooring up a flight of stairs, puzzling out a layout and nailing the floor down are all physically and mentally demanding tasks. It's not the sort of thing you can rush into and expect good results. Nonetheless, laying a wood floor is well within the ability of anyone with average tool dexterity. It takes very few special tools, materials are readily available and, if this book does its job, the skills will come quickly.

I've intentionally limited the breadth of this book to three major kinds of wood flooring: strip, plank and parquet. Through drawings, photos and text, I have attempted to explain as thoroughly as possible how to install each kind of flooring. However, I have by no means covered every variation of each type, preferring instead to convey enough fundamentals to allow you to interpolate solutions for problems not specifically discussed. Like any other trade, flooring has its share of "special cases" -- what to do, for example, when new flooring must match old or how to deal with radiant heating. I've tried to include real-world solutions to these problems, but again, not every situation is covered.

As are all endeavors, this book is a bit of a compromise. I have written it primarily with the experienced owner-builder in mind, so most of the book is devoted to detailed how-to information on installing wood floors. However, readers who wish to subcontract the work to a professional will also find useful information, especially in Chapter 1, which deals with selecting and specifying floors, and in Chapter 2, which explains material grading rules. These chapters should also be informative to architects, designers and builders who may occasionally need to deal with flooring contractors. And although I don't intend this book as a trade manual, I hope professional floor mechanics will find useful nuggets within its pages.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Why Install a Wood Floor?

2. Materials, Estimating and Tools

3. Preparation and Underlayment

4. Strip and Plank: Layout and Installation

5. Parquet: Layout and Installation

6. Sanding and Finishing

Resource Guide

Index