With thousands of hardwood flooring options available, selecting the perfect floor for your home or retail design can be quite challenging. Working with a designer or hardwood flooring company is always ideal in your selection process, but for those of you who want to know the best tips for buying hardwood flooring, this guide will help you.
Understanding the Basics
When you walk into the showroom and begin looking at hardwood flooring, it’ll be tough to make your selection if you don’t know what you want. That’s why you’ll need to take a look at your needs before heading off to our hardwood flooring showroom. Let’s take a look at some of the things that you’ll need to know!
1. Learning About Your Sub-Floor
In order to understand what your limitations are when it comes to hardwood flooring, you need to understand the flooring directly beneath your hardwood floor. This section of flooring is called your sub-floor.
Typically, sub-floors are made of concrete or plywood. The type of sub-flooring you have determines what kind of hardwood floors you can get. The type also determines how you should lay your hardwood floors and whether you should use nails, glue, floats, or anything else.
If you have a plywood sub-floor, you should use solid hardwood flooring instead of engineered hardwood flooring. You could use engineered hardwood flooring, but this wouldn’t hold up for a long period of time.
If you have concrete flooring, your options for hardwood flooring are more limited and more expensive. You can use either solid hardwood flooring or engineered hardwood flooring, but both options come with their own caveats.
If you use engineered hardwood flooring on top of concrete sub-flooring, you may need to buff your concrete floor. If the concrete sub-flooring is uneven or bumpy, the engineered hardwood flooring wouldn’t lay correctly on top of the sub-flooring.
If you use solid hardwood flooring on top of concrete sub-flooring, you have to add a plywood sub-flooring on top of the concrete sub-flooring. Of course, this adds to your flooring costs. Since you’re adding a second layer of sub-flooring, you’ll also be adding height to your flooring which may be an issue if you have flooring limits.
2. Assessing Flooring Height Limitations
Before you get into buying new flooring, you should know if you have any height limitations. Investigate your height limitations and take these into account when you’re choosing the kind of flooring that you want.
Solid hardwood flooring is about three-fourths of an inch thick, while engineered hardwood ranges between three-eighths to one-half of an inch thick. If you have to stack plank sub-flooring on top of your concrete sub-flooring, this adds about three-fourths of an inch on top of the engineered hardwood.
While checking for floor height limitations, you should be sure to check on your doors. If you have to raise the height of the floor, you could cut the doors. However, some door materials are harder to cut than others. Indoor doors also tend to be easier to cut than outdoor doors.
You should also be conscious of appliance access if you’re changing the floors in your kitchen. You don’t want to lock your dishwasher in if you’re replacing the kitchen flooring. You’ll also want to make sure that your cabinets are still able to open once the new flooring is applied.
In addition, you should ensure that you aren’t skipping any areas that may need replaced flooring. This could cause some issues with the raising and lowering of the floor. You don’t want your family or any guests tripping over gaps in the flooring.
3. Determining Goals and Objectives
Before you start digging out the old flooring and putting in the new flooring, you need to know what your flooring goals are. Think about everything that you want to accomplish with the flooring replacement job.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- What rooms are you wanting to replace the flooring in?
- Are you going to contain the new flooring to a few rooms or just one floor?
- Are you going to replace the flooring in your entire home?
Figure out where you want the new flooring and start thinking about what flooring you want in each of the rooms you’re considering. If you want to redo more rooms than you can afford, prioritize the most important replacements now. You can always replace the remaining floors later.
If you’re looking to save money, you should consider polishing your existing hardwood floors. Don’t trick yourself into believing that you’re stuck with the color and texture that your hardwood floors are currently. Pacific Hardwood Flooring offers maintenance on existing floors as well as new selections, so there is no pressure to purchase new hardwood every time you want a change.
4. Choosing Colors, Styles, and Beyond
Speaking of colors and textures, it’s important that you determine what you want your hardwood flooring to look like before searching up ‘hardwood flooring showrooms near me.’ If you don’t do your research and consider your home’s aesthetic, how will you know where to start looking once you arrive at the showroom?
It’s critical that you begin this process by doing a bit of research on hardwood flooring styles. Head over to Pinterest and create a board where you can pin images of interior design schemes that you like. Make sure to look at homes with similar layouts to your own.
After you’ve found 20-30 images, you can go back through these pictures and look for patterns. Do you see red undertones in a lot of the hardwood floors that you have pinned? Is there a certain kind of grain or knotting that you find yourself preferring?
Answering these questions will give you a better idea of what to look for when you begin to browse for your new floors.
Once you’ve finished your broader research on Pinterest, look closely at Pacific Hardwood’s project gallery. Here, you can see specific examples of the flooring types that you’ll find at the showroom that you plan on choosing your flooring at. This will give you a taste of some of the actual options you have to choose from and allow you to find one that best matches the findings of your Pinterest research.
5. Consider Your Decor Schemes
No matter what flooring styles you like, you need to consider the current decor schemes of each room in your home when choosing the flooring to put in it. Unless you want to perform a full home renovation, you’ll need to choose something that fits seamlessly into your existing decor.
For contemporary decor schemes, a lighter stain is definitely the way to go. You have multiple options including the icy gray European Oak Ardesia and the warmer and uniquely-knotted European Oak Toulouse. Both of these hardwood varieties are smooth, airy, and go beautifully with stainless steel countertops and fluorescent lighting.
However, for those with antique or mid-century modern decor, darker and heavier stains are likely the way to go. Not only do these decor styles incorporate a lot of heavy wooden furniture, but the rich dark hues of plush furniture also complement darker colors well.
Burgundy, royal purple, and navy blue are some of the most popular colors for antique homes, so you want to bring the regality of these hues out with heavier hardwood. If you haven’t already decorated your room with one of these schemes, we highly recommend it- they’re the perfect hues for million-dollar homes!
If you want to draw these rooms together with other contemporary areas of the home, you can use a darker variety of European Oak to match the lighter styles we discussed earlier. However, other rustic choices include dark bamboo, La Famiglia, and Brunello.
6. Warm and Cool Undertones
In addition to your decor style, you’ll need to consider the undertones of the wood that you’re selecting. An ‘undertone’ is essentially the color seen at the base of a plank of wood that modifies the overall feel of the main hues. For example, two light brown planks can look very different if one has reddish undertones and another has cool gray ones.
One of the main purposes of assessing the undertones of your different hardwood options is that you know which styles will go better in warmer-colored rooms and which will go better in cool-colored ones. Analyzing these hues leads to a more cohesive and aesthetically appealing space.
Wood for Cool Color Schemes
For example, if your bedroom has blue bedsheets and eggshell-white walls, it has a cool color scheme. This means that you want to choose hardwood flooring that has cool undertones such as grays, blues, and lighter whites. This means maple with shell-gray stain, ash wood, and anything with charcoal coloring (if you want something truly unique).
Rooms with cool color schemes also tend to look better with unpolished hardwood floor finishes. While they still of course need to be sanded down and made smooth, a bright varnish that light bounces off makes any wooden plank look warmer.
At Pacific Hardwood Flooring, we know that it’s much easier to see undertones in person than it is to decipher them from online images. That’s why we offer in-person samples of our hardwood options upon request. This gives you the opportunity to see and be more confident in your flooring selection.
Warmer Ideas
On the flip side, you may have a room that incorporates warmer hues. Red, orange, and yellow wall paints and furniture necessitate hardwood that has warmer undertones. This makes the space look welcoming and inviting.
Additionally, warmer undertones work best in rooms that have a lot of natural light. If your high-end home has spaces with large windows and gorgeous skylights, you’ll want to use a warmer hardwood. This means walnut, cherry, and maple are options that you need to be looking closely at.
Rooms that have more artificial light can use warm hardwood as well, but make sure that you’re installing lightbulbs that emit more cream-colored light than fluorescent bulbs. You want the light to appear more yellowish than icy.
7. Choose Something You Like
This may sound obvious, but many people actually forget to consider whether or not they like the wood that they’re selecting before choosing to install it.
No matter how well a hardwood goes in your space, it will appear to be an eyesore if you don’t like the way that it looks. Additionally, since you’ll need to make sure that everything matches its coloring, you’re bound to get more and more frustrated with it as time goes by.
Keep this at the forefront of your mind and continuously ask yourself whether or not you actually like the varieties that you’re putting aside as frontrunners for your home’s flooring!
Keep It Functional
When it comes to interior decor, functionality is just as important as aesthetics. For this reason, knowing the durability of your potential options is key.
To determine how durable each type of flooring you’re considering is, you’ll want to become familiar with the Janka Hardness Scale. This scale determines how well a specific type of wood can withstand impact without denting or chipping. Wood varieties that are higher on the scale are more durable and resistant to wear and tear.
How Durable Do You Need Your Hardwood?
Once you know the Janka rankings for each of your prospective hardwood options, it’s important that you consider what level of durability you need. Just because something has a lower Janka ranking doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be using it anywhere. It simply means that you may want to install it in areas with less foot traffic or heavy objects placed on it.
When determining the hardness of wood that you require, here are some questions to consider.
How Much Foot Traffic Will the Area Get?
Areas with more foot traffic will need harder wood flooring than those with less. While you will of course take care when walking, normal wear and tear are inevitably going to take place. Harder varieties of wood fight proactively against scratches and dents that come with more people walking on it and items being dropped onto the floor.
Who Lives in Your Home?
Homes with children and pets need harder flooring than homes where only adults reside. If you have these occupants in your home, you will want to place softer wood in areas that are restricted to them. This will help protect your more vulnerable hardwood from damage related to playing children and clumsy pets.
How Often Can You Repair or Replace Your Flooring?
The most important question to ask is how often you’re willing and able to replace your hardwood flooring. As someone who lives in a million-dollar home, you likely have the funds to replace it every few years, but some people prefer not to spend time and money on unnecessary installation anyway.
If this describes you, you need to be much more careful with the types of wood that you select. If you like softer woods, you may want to coat them in a strengthening epoxy. Professionals at Pacific can help you to do this in an effective and efficient way.
If you don’t like this idea, you can simply select harder alternatives to the softer wood that you like. There are hundreds of varieties that you can choose from at our showroom, so there’s no shortage of options that you’re sure to love!
Where Can I Find the Best Hardwood Flooring Showroom in Santa Monica?
If you’re looking for the best hardwood flooring showroom in Santa Monica, you should go to Pacific Hardwood Flooring. Our company has the best flooring showroom in 2020, so you know you’re getting the most modern styles when you shop with us. We are a luxury hardwood flooring business and we have the experience to deal with million-dollar homes.
With thousands of samples and a large range of color choices, Pacific Hardwood Flooring is better than the competition. Additionally, our showroom allows in-person sample viewings so that you can be 100% sure of your choice before ordering.
We also do not offer less durable flooring alternatives like vinyl and laminate surfaces, so you can rest assured that you are always getting the best flooring when you work with us. We specialize in the durable hardwood that high-end homes need to keep their interior design classy and functional.
Our experts can help you with the installation, supply, and maintenance of your hardwood floors. We provide samples of all of our hardwood flooring as requested, so make your request as soon as you see something you like. If you enjoy the sample provided, you can ask us about installation. If you decide it isn’t right for you, we’ll be happy to send another sample.
What Is the Hardwood Flooring Showroom Like?
Pacific’s hardwood flooring showroom is essentially the in-person version of an online wood catalog. When you head to the showroom, you can spend hours browsing samples of our quality hardwood. You can touch it and get a greater feel for the texture, durability, and graining of each board.
The best Santa Monica Showroom is superior to other hardwood browsing venues because it has such a wide variety of wood types. Not only can you view our extensive collection of European Oak, but you also will have the opportunity to see some reclaimed wood that we have in our collection.
Additionally, you will have the opportunity to look at some of our Parquet varieties, which are characteristic, long-lasting, and visually intriguing. If you want a one-of-a-kind space, checking out the texture of Parquet flooring is a great first step.
What Makes It Better Than Other Showrooms?
First and foremost, Pacific’s showroom has thousands of different samples that you can look at. No matter what type of wood you want, you can find it in a wide range of colors. This lets you choose not only the perfect variety for your home but also the right undertones and hue for the room that you will be installing the wood in.
Additionally, when you come to Pacific’s showroom, you will have the opportunity to talk about the samples you see with knowledgeable experts. Those around the showroom are experienced and passionate about the wooden samples that you’ll be looking at and able to tell you all about each variety that you consider.
While other hardwood flooring services in Santa Monica showroom spaces would leave you to painstakingly Google the properties of each wood while you tried to browse, you will be able to get the best in-person information from Pacific.
Get Started
While choosing the right flooring can be a challenge, it’s a much easier task when you look into your existing floor, know your limitations, and understand the colors and styles that you may want to try. Plus, with the best hardwood flooring showroom in Santa Monica, you will always have an expert there to help you with every part of the selection process.
Now that you know how to choose the right hardwood flooring options for your home, it’s time to get started. Contact us with any lingering questions you may have about types of hardwood flooring and how you can choose between them. Our experts are committed to making your home as comfortable and cohesive a space as possible, so we look forward to hearing from you soon!