Celebrating National Remodeling Month – Ideas For Inspiration
Did you know May is National Remodeling month? To celebrate, we thought it would be fun to share a few places for you to find remodeling ideas for your home: Houzz.com – With more than 400,000 photos of recently redesigned homes (both inside and out), Houzz features thousands of highly-engaging articles written by design experts, product recommendations and social tools to manage the remodeling and decorating process. Wondering if your dream home is possible? Search “before and after” for to see examples of how houses were transformed. Or, if you want ideas for a specific project, you can search for [...]
Meet the Manufacturer: EcoFusion
We’re excited to introduce EcoFusion, one of our newest manufacturers! We just started carrying their eco-friendly flooring products a couple of months ago, and clients have been just as thrilled with them as we have been! From bamboo flooring to recycled hardwood, this is definitely one manufacturer to consider as you select new floors for your home. Why do we love EcoFusion? By blending renewable and recyclable materials, they’re able to create beautiful eco-friendly flooring. They offer three basic product lines: Strand Woven Bamboo: With a 35-year transferrable warranty, this bamboo flooring has an engineered cross-grain core to add stability [...]
Meet the Manufacturer: HomerWood
Here’s another manufacturer you won’t want to miss: HomerWood Premium Hardwood Flooring. Their beautiful wood floors are created from high-quality materials and with the environment in mind, making them an eco-friendly option for homeowners that care about sustainability. HomerWood offers a wide array of hardwood flooring options for homeowners, including pre-finished varieties, wider and longer planks than many manufacturers, reclaimed wood and designs like wire brushed and soft scraped. For those that want distressed floors, HomerWood’s premium hardwood flooring is hand-scraped by local Pennsylvania Dutch craftsmen that use techniques perfect by generations of Amish woodworkers. How sustainable is HomerWood? A [...]
Dressing Your Hardwood Floors: Selecting an Area Rug
Now that you have wonderful new hardwood floors in your home, what type of area rugs should you buy? Here’s our advice for choosing area rugs: Figure out the size area rug you want. Measure the space and choose one that is two feet shorter than the smallest wall in the room (this is HGTV’s Karl Lohnes’ rule of thumb). Standard rug sizes are 4 x 6, 5 x 8, 6 x 9, 8 x 10, 9 x 12 and 12 x 14. Think about your color scheme, design and texture. Do you already have furniture? As you go to [...]
Meet the Manufacturer: Southend Building Products
As we shared in our last post, reclaimed flooring is a great way to reuse historical resources and keep your home green. Salvaged from old buildings, antique barns, river bottoms and trees removed from urban settings, reclaimed floors are naturally very stunning and come with a distressed look. A great place to get reclaimed flooring is from Southend Building Products, Inc. In fact, we’re very excited that we just started working with them! We like to recommend them for several reasons, including their high-quality products and commitment to sustainability. Southend Building Products has been a leader in the reclaimed and [...]
Going Green: All About Reclaimed Flooring
A sustainable option for those that want eco-friendly hardwood floors, reclaimed flooring is wood salvaged from old buildings, antique barns, river bottoms, trees removed from urban settings, etc. As this type of flooring is made from wood that doesn’t serve a functional purpose anymore, it’s a great way to reuse historical resources and keep your home green. Curious how the process works? There are a few key steps when it comes to reclaiming wood to use as hardwood flooring in a home: The manufacturer looks for obsolete structures built with wood species like pine, oak and chestnut and carefully harvests [...]
How Hardwood Flooring is Made, Part 2: Engineered Wood Floors
Are you familiar with the methods used to create floors? Last week we covered how solid hardwood is made, but what about engineered wood flooring? Here’s a basic overview of the process: As we’ve explained before, engineered hardwood is comprised of finished wood and less expensive, stronger wood layers pressed together, with the grains running in different directions. So the construction involves gluing various wood plies, or plywood (also referred to as core board), with a veneer of real hardwood on top. To make sure the engineered hardwood flooring is strong, the core board is created by stacking pieces of [...]
How Hardwood Flooring is Made, Part 1: Solid Wood Floors
Have you ever wondered what exactly goes into making hardwood floors? The most traditional and long-standing type, solid wood flooring is made from planks from a single piece of wood. Its creation begins with a tree. After the tree is cut into logs, those marked for flooring (generally have tight grain and few knots) are cut into rough planks by one of a variety methods like: Flat or Plain Sawn – the most common type, strips are cut off the log into planks of wood. Quarter Sawn – the log is divided into fourths before being cut into strips of [...]
Meet the Manufacturer: Owens Flooring
Have you considered investing in engineered hardwood floors? One company to take a look at is Owens Flooring by Colonial Craft. Their Plankfloor flooring, made from high quality Baltic birch plywood and solid hardwood, is an eco-friendly alternative that makes a fantastic addition to any home. For homeowners worried about VOCs, Plankfloor is compliant with the strictest emission standards and CARB Phase II certified to protect the home’s air quality. It’s FSC certified, too! Find out more about Owens Flooring’s Plankfloor on Quanex.com, and be sure to let us know if you want additional engineered hardwood flooring suggestions! Photo courtesy [...]
Hot Flooring Trend: Bamboo
Do you want style beneath your feet? One of the hottest trends in kitchen flooring right now is bamboo. And it’s not hard to figure out why. From its versatile colors and style to its sustainability and practicality, more and more homeowners are choosing bamboo floors for their home. Here are 3 reasons to consider bamboo flooring: Eco-Friendly and Healthy. Bamboo is one of the most sustainable flooring materials available. Unlike traditional hardwoods that take 20-120 years to mature, bamboo is ready in 3-5 years, and harvesting doesn’t affect the root system, meaning the plant can simply keep growing over [...]
