Hardwood
San Diego Hardwood Flooring & Installation, Solid Wood, Engineered Floors
MJ Flooring Center & Design is your best source for hardwood floors. Serving San Diego for over 8 years now, we specialize in providing the best service for your flooring needs. We specialize in solid hardwood, engineered hardwood, hardwood installation and custom hardwood design.
Hardwood installation is one of our specialties, that is why we are confident in giving you a 100% warranty on our installation. You have no need to worry about any mistakes or shortcuts being done when it comes time to install your hardwood floors.
Solid hardwood floors come in a wide range of dimensions and styles, with each plank made of solid wood and milled from a single piece of timber. Solid hardwood floors were originally used for structural purposes, being installed perpendicular to the wooden support beams of a building. Modern construction techniques now rarely use wood building frames and solid hardwood floors are used almost exclusively for their appearance.
For flooring, solid wood has many limitations due to the natural characteristics of wood. Expansion and contraction of wood from moisture and temperature fluctuation puts many dimensional restrictions on solid wood floors. Typically, 5″ wide and 3/4″ thick boards are the largest that can be manufactured from solid wood without compromising the structure of the flooring (some manufacturers produce wider boards using proprietary milling techniques). There is, however, no standard size which will perform well in every environment. For contemporary construction techniques, the most significant characteristic of solid wood floors is that they are not recommended to be installed directly over concrete.
Solid wood can be cut in three styles: flat-sawn, quarter-sawn, and rift-sawn. However, because only one side of the wood is visible on flooring, “quarter-sawn” and “rift-sawn” will have the same appearance. Many solid woods come with “absorption strips” – grooves cut into the back of the wood that run the length of each plank. They are used to reduce cupping.
Solid wood floors are mostly manufactured with a tongue-and-groove for installation.
Engineered
San Diego Engineered Wood Flooring, Engineered Wood Flooring Specialist Serving San Diego
Engineered wood flooring is composed of two or more layers of wood in the form of a plank. The top layer (lamella) is the wood that is visible when the flooring is installed, and is adhered to the core (or substrate) which provides the stability.
Laminate, vinyl and veneer floors are often confused with engineered wood floors – laminate uses an image of wood on its surface, vinyl is plastic formed to look like wood, and veneer uses a thin layer of wood with a core that could be one of a number of different composite wood products (most commonly, high density fiberboard).
Engineered wood is the most common type of wood flooring used globally. North America is the only continent that has a larger solid wood market than engineered, although engineered wood is quickly catching up in market share.
<h3>Lamella</h3>
The lamella is the face layer of the wood that is visible when installed. Typically it is a sawn piece of timber.
The timber can be cut in three different styles: flat-sawn, quarter-sawn, and rift-sawn. However, because only one side of the wood is visible on flooring, “quarter-sawn” and “rift-sawn” will have the same appearance.
<h3>The Core / Substrate</h3>
1) Wood ply construction (“sandwich core”): Uses multiple thin plies of wood adhered together. The wood grain of each ply runs perpendicular to the ply below it. Stability is attained from using thin layers of wood that have little to no reaction to climatic change. The wood is further stabilized due to equal pressure being exerted lengthwise and widthwise from the plies running perpendicular to each other.
2) Finger core construction: Finger core engineered wood floors are made of small pieces of milled timber that run perpendicular to the top layer (lamella) of wood. They can be 2-ply or 3-ply, depending on their intended use. If it is three ply, the third ply is often plywood that runs parallel to the lamella. Stability is gained through the grains running perpendicular to each other, and the expansion and contraction of wood is reduced and relegated to the middle ply, stopping the floor from gapping or cupping.
3) Fibreboard: The core is made up of medium or high density fibreboard. Fibreboard has minimal expansion and contraction so the core is very stable. Due to the softer nature of fibreboard, wood floors with a thin lamella or veneer are more prone to denting. Fibreboard is less expensive than timber but is not VOC free and is not environmentally friendly.
Bamboo
San Diego Bamboo Floors, Bamboo Flooring – The Ecological Choice
A common error some make about bamboo is that it is a type of hardwood. Not to be confused with common associations of many species of grass, bamboo is actually a type of grass which matures into a material that can rival the hardness of maple! Being well adapted to the environment in which bamboo commonly grows, each bamboo plant thrives in areas of fair to poor soil quality, and still remains to be one of the fastest growing plants in the world.
Controlled harvesting of the bamboo plant has very little impact on each individual stalk, which will continue to grow long after harvesting. This is what makes bamboo such a renewable source of flooring material, and why it is often associated with environmentally minded choices for flooring. The fact that it is such a uniquely attractive flooring option makes bamboo flooring an extremely beneficial choice for your own interior environment!
How Bamboo is Made
Once the bamboo has been harvested, the outer layer of green “skin” is removed and each stalk is cut into lengthwise strips or “fillets”. These curved fillets of bamboo are milled along their outer edges in order to flatten them. The excess elements of this process will go into another type of bamboo flooring that is called “strand-woven bamboo flooring” – more on that later. The flattened strips of bamboo are then kiln dried in order to remove the natural moisture in the bamboo, and are then boiled. The bamboo fillets are now ready to be glued together to make a solid, dependable surface that is more than suitable for flooring.
The bamboo undergoes one final compression stage, which makes it that much more durable and ready to ship. Tongue and groove elements are added in order to make an installation as easy as possible. It should be mentioned that the outcome of this manufacturing process is dependent on which kind of bamboo flooring is being made. There are several types of bamboo flooring, both in terms of cut and of color, and some differences in how they are processed.
Horizontal or Vertical Bamboo Flooring Installation
During the gluing process, the bamboo can either be bound with the narrow edges facing up, which results in a thin, channel pattern in the bamboo flooring, or so that the broader surface of the bamboo is bound facing upward, making for a surface that is more akin to traditional hardwood patterns. These styles of bamboo flooring are known as vertical and horizontal bamboo flooring respectively.
There are visual benefits for each one, depending on your personal taste, but both remain to be decorative choices. The horizontal style is striking for its “knuckle” or “node” patterns, that is, the pattern naturally occurring in the bamboo that are the equivalent of “growth rings” in many hardwood species. The vertical style is a unique surface that remains unmatched by any other natural flooring material, characterized by decorative, narrow channels caused by the binding of the bamboo strips.
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