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dadiOH[_3_] dadiOH[_3_] is offline
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Default Best wood floors in dry climate?

Chris Shearer Cooper wrote:
I live in Colorado, and a few years ago had a bamboo floor installed
in my kitchen and living room, and have been very disappointed.
Despite the whole-house humidifier attached to the forced air heating
system, the "planks" (is that the right word?) contract in the winter,
and then kitchen debris finds its way into the cracks, and we end up
with ugly black lines where the planks touch.

So now we're wanting to replace the 20-year-old carpet in the upstairs
with some kind of wood floor, and are not sure which way to go.

The other complication, is that we need to live in these rooms while
we're putting in new floors - we'll move all the furniture out of the
unused bedroom, redo its floor, move my daughter into that bedroom,
redo her floor, etc. so we whatever we use, it needs to be
prefinished.

There are some nice-looking engineered wood products, but we're
concerned about the odors ... the off-gassing from a lot of those
kinds of products gives us headaches, which pushes us towards solid
wood, but then with solid wood you can't install a floating floor, so
I'm worried we would get the gap problem again. And then again, I'm
wondering if it's maybe the offgassing from the prefinish that gives
us the headache, in which case for the headache it wouldn't matter if
we chose solid vs. engineered vs. laminate.

Was the guy at Home Depot right, that the more traditional woods (oak,
for example) do better in the dry climate of Colorado?


I have no idea whether he is correct or not but I certainly prefer it. My
experience...

I laid solid maple in my wife's home office about 10-12 years ago. The
planks are about 2 1/2" wide. We live in central Florida...hot and very
humid in the summer, cool and much dryer - but not as dry as Colorado - in
the winter.

The planks were acclimatized in the house for several weeks. They were laid
in the summer and as tight to each other as I could get them. Most but not
all were tight to their neighbors; any gaps were minimal - maybe 1/64 - and
were due to planks not being perfectly straight. Gaps were filled with saw
dust and varnish before final sanding and finishing.

In the winter, most all planks are still tight to their neighbors. Those
that are not are 1/32 at the most. Oddly, the tight ones that had slight
filling push up that filling in the winter...not enough to be easily visible
but enough to feel with your finger. That pushing up may be year around,
don't know.

Winter or summer, the floor looks good and homogenous.



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dadiOH
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