Contact Floor Coverings International Of Houston
Transcript
Kim Gustafson:
But if you’re down on concrete, it is much wiser to use an engineered hardwood.
Hi, I’m Kim with Floor Coverings International. I wanted to talk to you just for a minute about wood-look floors, because there’s a lot of different options when it comes to floors that are wood or look like wood. And I get a lot of questions about what are the differences. So let’s just take a quick look. This first floor that I have right here is a laminate floor.
And how you can tell it’s laminate, it’s got this particle board type center, and it’s got a almost ceramic coating on the bottom and top. The picture is meant to look like wood, as you can see, and the finish on this floor is very durable from the top. But because it’s got this type of a core, it’s not a very water-resistant floor. Now, there are some on the market now that are more water-resistant, but still, it’s a pressed wood center.
The next floor that I wanted to show you is luxury vinyl plank. Luxury vinyl plank comes in different thicknesses, but as you can see, it also has wood graining, and it clicks in place. Like laminate, it is a floor that floats on top of your subfloor. These are not glued or adhered to the floor in any way. It’s a cost-effective solution, more cost-effective than wood or tile, and it gives you a nice wood look. Generally speaking for laminate and luxury vinyl plank, and even the next one, which is tile, the planks are all the same length. That’s what makes it a little bit different from wood as well, is the uniformity of the plank size.
So if you move on, you can see that we’ve got a wood-look tile. The wood-look tile is a thicker product and it’s something that we need to install to your subfloor by gluing it on with thinset. We can give you a beautiful tight grout line if you choose to buy a rectified tile, and this one happens to be a rectified tile. You can tell because the edges are super sharp, and what that means is it was cut after it was fired, so it was cut a second time. Most tile is just cut once and then fired, but a rectified tile also gets an extra step, and that means that I can get the grout lines really tight, like one-16th of an inch so that it looks more like wood, because it looks like fake wood if you have a tile floor and you have a really wide grout line.
Okay, so moving on. The floor that we have down here, this is an engineered pre-finished hardwood, so you can probably see the tongue in the groove and you can see the different layers in this hardwood. It’s pre-finished, so it’s stained before it comes onto the floor, before it comes into the house. It comes in boxes pre-stained, and the finish on most of these, or the ones that I sell usually has a hardener in the top of it, like aluminum oxide. That makes it a really durable surface, more durable than any finish that we can put on in your house.
And then lastly, I have two separate pieces of unfinished hardwood. The difference between these is one of them is engineered, you can see it’s different layers, and then the other one is solid. You can see it’s all one piece of hardwood that’s just been cut with the tongue in the groove. Now, in Houston, on the second story, you can use either of these two products. But if you’re down on concrete, it is much wiser to use an engineered hardwood because it’s more dimensionally stable. But if you want a look that looks like solid hardwood and is dimensionally stable to go on concrete, I suggest an unfinished engineered hardwood that we sand and finish in place just like a traditional hardwood.
