Some hard(wood) facts on flooring
By: Daryl Stayura, Divine Hardwood
We have seen a huge shift over the last year in terms of what customers are looking for in their hardwood flooring. For example, wider planks have become increasingly popular and desirable for customers. Our available option for a wider plank, at Divine Hardwood, is engineered flooring.
Two years ago, if you were to discuss engineered flooring with a customer, they would have assumed you were selling laminate and would have wanted nothing to do with it. But now we’re seeing customers move towards engineered flooring in order to get the wider planks that are only available with this option.
Customers are more concerned with a specific look and less concerned with name brands. Very rarely do we have someone come into our showroom asking for a specific manufacturer of hardwood. In the past, if somebody were to ask for, we would just deal with it on a case-by-case basis. Today though, this is very rare and almost non-existent. When customers come in looking for a specific look, these are usually the requests we hear:
- Wire-brushed – hardwood floors with planks that have been brushed with hand wire brushes. These hard-wired brushes scrape all of the soft wood off of the top of the floor planks, leaving only the hardest wood and exposing more of the wood’s natural grain.
- Thermo-treated – wood flooring treated with heat and steam. This process changes the wood’s colour all the way through the board, and also changes some of the physical characteristics of the boards. The result is a very exotic look.
- Wide-plank – Here, the boards have been engineered for a thicker, chunky look and are wider than 3 1/4". At Divine Hardwood, we carry widths from 4 3/4" up to 10". Wide-plank hardwood is also 10 times more stable than 3/4" solid wood flooring!
- UV Oil Finish – This is an oil finish that is penetrating. Much different from the aluminum oxide finish that we are used to seeing which only sits on the surface of the wood. The advantage to UV oil is the ease of repair and its more natural look.
- Hand-scraped – Hand-scraped hardwood is literally what you would think it is. Someone has taken a hand tool at the factory and has worked over the surface of each board to create a series of broad, shallow grooves on the board’s surface. This is a very popular hardwood flooring option.
The change in customers’ attitudes has been great for Divine Hardwood. It has forced us to think outside the box and search for products worldwide, not just locally sourced, in order to maintain our position as an industry leader in innovation and product development.
Today, we are well set-up and partnered with great manufacturers from around the globe in North America, South America, Europe and Asia. The future of hardwood flooring looks very exciting. There is so much more pressure on today’s manufacturers to be more innovative and trend-setting than ever before. At Divine Hardwood, we feel very well-positioned to stay an industry frontrunner and bring new unique products to Cedarglen customers!
Check out these links to some of our suppliers for further product information:
Haro – www.haro.com
Eterna – www.eternafloors.com
PG Model – www.pgflooring.com