Four on the floorby David ZimmerSolid, prefinished, engineered, or laminate – the wood floor in your cottage is not just wood anymore. For something that lies down on the job all day, cottage flooring does a lot of work. It has to be kind to our feet, yet absorb an amazing amount of wear and tear and look good in the process. The floor-covering market has dozens of lay-down options, including linoleum, sheet vinyl, ceramic tile, and natural stone, but in cottage country, wood and its look-alikes corner the market. It makes sense, given that trees are such a big part of the cottage experience. Not only does wood simply suit a cottage floor, but it can be tailored to any interior styling, from a sway-backed old fish camp to a zillion-dollar megaplex. While solid wood floors have been around ever since we figured out how to down trees, there are many newcomers to the floor show, including so-called engineered wood floors, laminates, and prefinished variants on the traditional. Herewith, the skinny on wood flooring, from the traditional tree slice to its chemical-age cousins. Solid WoodAh, solid wood, the old-time cottage favourite. Beautiful, long-lasting, and available in as many styles as there are trees in the forest and stains to tint them. Easy on the feet and easy on the eyes, solid wood floors haven't changed much over the years. Or have they? Traditionally, a solid wood floor meant 3⁄4"-thick pieces, planed flat, with a tongue-and-groove profile milled on the edges. In hardwood, you can get planks from 21⁄4" to 14" wide and in lengths of 16' or more, although the longer and wider planks are usually only available as a custom order from a mill. Softwoods are even available in widths up to 20". Quite a board. As for installation, each plank is nailed through the tongue at an angle, locking it to the subfloor and the preceding piece. Once installed, this raw flooring is sanded to get rid of any ridges, lumps, or bumps, then meticulously cleaned, stained (or left clear), and protected with three or more coats of finish, usually polyurethane. It's a time-honoured and effective method that produces a flat, smooth floor with a very durable finish. It also allows periodic refinishing if catastrophic damage or normal wear and tear cuts through the polyurethane surface; simply sand the floor and apply new finish. Leonard Schamehorn has wood flooring in his blood. His grandfather worked at a flooring factory and his dad got into installing and refinishing around 1948. By 1950, young Leonard was running the sander (which he still uses today). Working in and around Huntsville, Ont., Schamehorn has installed and refinished almost every kind of wood flooring in the intervening years and he’s a big fan of solid flooring. “Solid wood is very durable and you can refinish it,” he says. “I’ve even been into places where they had a fire and as long as the fire wasn't actually burning on the floor, I could bring it back.” While unfinished wood flooring has been with us for centuries, the new kid on the block and now the most popular player in the market is prefinished wood flooring. Though installed in pretty much the same way as an unfinished floor, prefinished products have their makeup applied right at the factory, where the tongue-and-groove boards receive five to eight coats of sprayed polyurethane, dried with ultraviolet light between coats. Most of these finishes also incorporate aluminum oxide – a crystalline industrial abrasive, not quite as hard as diamond, that adds durability – and are often backed by wear warranties of as long as 25 years. The appeal of prefinished products among builders and cottage reno artists is obvious: With the finish already applied, installers can skip the sanding, cleaning, and finishing process required with a traditional wood floor. “The old school is definitely unfinished,” says Robert Belisle, marketing and sales director with Tembec Forest Products in Huntsville, makers of the Muskoka Prefinished Flooring brand. “The new school wants to pull the carpet out in the morning and have the furniture back at the end of the day.” And as Dave Labelle of Georgian Flooring Centre in Collingwood, Ont., points out, contractors love a prefinished product because time is money. With solid wood, “when they have to sand and finish, you shut the whole building down during that time,” he explains. “You can't have guys messing around with paint and you can't have sawdust in the air.” With prefinished wood, contractors can be working in other parts of the house while the floor is going in. So why would anyone in their right mind choose old-fashioned raw wood when prefinished products are available, waiting to spring, fully formed, from their shipping carton? The answer is width and length, and a little groove thing. To create a premium product, prefinished flooring manufacturers take rough boards, cut out the defects, then mill these pieces into flooring, usually 21⁄4" or 31⁄4" in width. Unfortunately, some high-tech finishing lines have length limitations, where the longest boards that can be accommodated are less than 7'. That means prefinished planks tend to be short – 60" is a common maximum length – with each carton usually containing a random mix of long and short pieces. And while a traditional unfinished floor gets sanded perfectly flat, most prefinished products, to hide tiny inconsistencies in fit and sometimes as a requirement of the factory finishing line, have an edge bevel, which shows as a groove between the boards of the floor. The groove varies in size from a noticeable V-profile, like you might find in a pine ceiling, to an almost imperceptible micro- or nano-bevel. It’s a matter of aesthetics, really. Some people don't even notice the bevelled look, while others can't tolerate the grooves and find they tend to catch dirt and dust. Making the gradeOkay, here’s the confusing part. Whether their wood flooring is raw or prefinished, manufacturers will use terms like “premium,” “prime,” “rustic,” “classic,” and a whole raft of others to differentiate their product lines. These terms are visual descriptors that organize flooring according to the way they look. They do not reflect the quality or durability of the actual floor. As Jim Koudys of wideplankflooring.ca, a division of Kootur Lumber in Smithville, Ont., explains, while the National Hardwood Lumber Association sets the grading for rough lumber, “once it has been turned into flooring, that manufacturer can call it anything he wants. I have the right to call my wide-plank flooring ‘perfectly clear,’ even if it’s full of knots.” There’s no conspiracy, it’s just that manufacturers need to catalogue a line of products by looks and cost. Often, totally clear, evenly coloured, knot-free boards will command a premium price, while other wood with tight knots and a mix of tones and colours will be offered as a mid-grade. At the bottom of the line, “rustic-,” “cottage-,” or “tavern-” labelled products will have more knots, defects, and colour variations, and they'll usually come in shorter lengths. “We call our lower-grade maple ‘rustic,’” says Tembec’s Robert Belisle, “but it doesn't mean the quality of that floor is any less than the upper grade. It’s an aesthetic visual reference to the amount of heartwood, sapwood, and colour variation in the wood.” To further bamboozle the name game, many in-house grades change over time to reflect consumer tastes, according to John Himes, director of hardwood for Mannington Mills, a leading manufacturer of wood flooring based in Salem, New Jersey. “With the rustic trend that’s set upon North America in the last five years, the grades that used to be the lower end are now the higher end because people are looking for colour variation and they want to see some knots.” The moral? Ignore the names and go for the look that tickles your fancy. A less-expensive, lower-grade floor can last just as long as a more-expensive, top-grade floor from the same manufacturer. Engineered WoodAlong with the solid-wood selection at your flooring store you'll find engineered hardwoods, usually three, five, or seven layers of plywood running at perpendicular angles bonded to a top veneer of hardwood, typically 1⁄16" to 1⁄8" thick. All these layers are glued and compressed together, then finished with multiple coats of UV-cured polyurethane and a sprinkling of aluminum oxide to give them better wear characteristics. Final thicknesses run from 3⁄8" to 9⁄16" and, much like prefinished hardwoods, they're typically available in widths up to about 5" and many have a bevelled edge. Each carton has a mix of lengths, so the final laid product has the random look of a typical wood floor. What you get looks for all the world like a solid hardwood floor, but has the criss-cross plies below the surface that resist wood’s natural urge to expand and contract. “One of the biggest advantages of engineered wood floors is that they can go almost anywhere in a cottage,” says John Himes. “Above grade, on grade, or below grade, it all depends on how you want to install them.” Engineered wood floors can be nailed or stapled through the tongue, just like solid wood, or edge-glued and floated over an underpad, or simply glued down tight to the subfloor. Dave Labelle puts a lot of engineered wood floors into cottages and thinks they're perfect for the application. “The key is that you want to get a product that is made specifically to withstand the temperature and humidity changes that aren’t regulated when the people aren’t there,” he says. (See “Minding the Gaps,” p. 78.) And Labelle also likes the wide variety of veneers that have come on the market. “It used to be you could get oak, oak, or oak,” he notes. “Then they introduced maple into the scenario in very few colours. Now there’s lots of maple plus many other species, including exotics like Brazilian teak.” Himes finds engineered woods are popular for basement applications, which would be unsuitable for solid wood because of elevated humidity levels and moisture in the subfloor. As long as the concrete is “visually dry,” with no history of moisture problems, engineered woods can be glued onto it with moisture-cure urethane glues. “For most concrete installations, folks love to glue it down,” says Himes. “It really works well and you get a nice solid sound.” Manufacturers lean heavily on those factory-applied aluminum oxide finishes, which are really tough, but damage from children, dogs, cats, fireplace embers, and falling pet rocks is inevitable, especially at the cottage. Light scratches might be fixed with a “screen and recoat” – a light abrasion followed by fresh polyurethane – but more serious abuses require sanding, which is problematic when you're dealing with a very thin skin of wood on top of all that engineering. Leonard Schamehorn has installed a lot of engineered floors and refinished a good many more, and feels they just don't have the longevity of a solid product. “Most of your engineered wood has at most 1⁄8" of veneer on it, and once that 1⁄8" is gone you have to start all over again,” he says. “I refinished one they said could be sanded at least twice. I’m very careful and take very little off, but I went through in one spot where there was a hump in the floor.” LaminatesIncreasingly popular in the flooring market, floating laminate floors are a recent import from Europe, hitting Canadian stores in the early ’90s. Embraced for their near indestructibility and easy maintenance, laminates are composed of a high-density fibreboard core, on top of which paper – printed with an actual picture of wood (or tile, or even stone) – is applied. These are saturated in melamine resins – the same stuff on your kitchen counter – then another overlay paper is applied, this one saturated in melamine resins and loaded with aluminum oxide particles. The whole sandwich is fused together under intense heat and pressure to form the finished flooring, typically sold in “planks” about 8" wide by 48" long. The visuals, whether antique barnboard or Tuscan cobblestone, can be anything that can be photographed. “What you get is a plastic-like surface that looks like more desirable products, such as wood or tile or stone, but has much different performance properties,” explains John Himes. “Laminate floors are very easy to maintain and hold up to all the traffic issues you might have at a vacation place with kids and dogs. It’s a very durable floor.” For installation, the individual planks are either edge-glued or simply clicked together with an interlocking tongue-and-groove system, where “the planks lock themselves together without any need for glue,” Himes explains. “There’s a lot less cleanup and it’s typically faster, especially for a DIYer.” The planks are not fastened to the subfloor, but left to float over an underpad, expanding and contracting as a single entity (space for expansion must be left on all sides of the floor). Not all laminates are created equal, however, with less-expensive lines sometimes being thinner and less dense and usually having less aluminum oxide in their topcoats. Cheaper laminates also look, well, cheap, with a very plasticky finish and more repeated patterns per box. “When you get into the pricier ones with the better finishes, they have more shots,” explains Labelle, and more images means fewer repeated patterns on the finished floor. “The idea when you're laying it is that you want it to look like real wood, and the more you spend, the more shots you'll get.” Mannington has picked up a few design awards for its floors, the photos for which are painstakingly sourced in the real world. “Instead of just modifying some oak artwork, we go get those original boards or reclaimed timbers from a Baltimore & Ohio railyard or a torn-down barn theatre and see what’s in those boards that we can emulate or duplicate,” says Himes. And with laminates, you can get look-alikes for woods that would otherwise never appear on floors. Spalted maple, a result of a fungal attack that leaves decorative black streaks in the grain, is too rare to find in the quantities needed for a floor. Dennis Lynch recently installed a laminate floor in the living room of his year-round cottage on Manitouwabing Lake, near Parry Sound, Ont., and swears by the stuff. Faced with a constant supply of tracked-in sand, two golden retrievers, and a smallish German shepherd, Lynch wanted something bulletproof but still good-looking. “It doesn't matter who does what in that room, I don't worry about it. It’s just that tough,” he says. “I’m really a proponent of it in areas where you have a lot of traffic and don't want to have your heart in your mouth. Is it the same thing as natural wood? No, but it’s damn close.” In all fairness, it needs to be said that toughness comes at a price, because while a high-grade laminate floor might fool the eye, it won't fool your feet. Solid or engineered wood floors have a bit of give in them, as each board deflects imperceptibly underfoot. With a floating laminate floor, what you're walking on is essentially a unified sheet of hard melamine, and your footsies can tell the difference. “It can have a bit of a clacky sound,” says Labelle, who has all three types of flooring installed in his house. “When someone walks in, it can resonate through the whole place.” Labelle cushions the sound and warms the floor with a variety of underpads, from a basic foam sheet, to composites that include an integral vapour barrier, to natural cork. The better underpads help minimize footfall sound. Forest floorsWhile most people choose wood on looks alone, each species has unique properties you should ask about: Some are more resistant to dents, water damage, and seasonal movement than others. A floor’s durability and scratch resistance is affected by the wood’s hardness, rated using the Janka test, which measures the force needed to embed a small steel ball up to its waist in the wood. In a year-round home, it’s easy to control seasonal humidity levels, but at a cottage that gets closed up in the fall, it’s almost impossible to mitigate swings in ambient moisture. On those hot, muggy days of summer, humidity levels soar, while in winter the cottage environment can be desert dry. And wood heat, a favourite of year-round cottagers, can dry the air even more. These shifts can pose problems for flooring because of wood’s natural tendency to swell across the grain when humidity is high, which can create ridges or humps, and shrink the same way in the dry season, causing gaps to appear. One solution to this problem is to install a full-fledged heating system in your cottage, complete with a Code-approved heat-recovery ventilation system, air conditioner, and humidifier, and keep it running throughout the year. The other is to simply choose the right flooring for your conditions and take a few anti-humidity precautions when you install it. Some areas of a cottage, like a perpetually damp bathroom or converted basement space, are simply not the right place for solid wood flooring. Better to use laminates that can be installed in hostile areas if they have the right underlay. Laminate flooring expands and contracts as a whole – that’s why an expansion gap is left around the perimeter of a laminate installation. Engineered products, because of their cross-ply construction, are also better than solid at withstanding higher humidity levels (if installed with the proper underlay, according to manufacturer’s instructions). The upshotThere are lots of choices for lots of budgets in the wood and wood-look-alike flooring market, but it seems impossible to escape the social stigma of having anything other than a “real” wood floor. Truth be told, there’s no correct answer. You might even need a different product for different parts of the cottage. Dave Labelle installed laminate with a cork underlay in his kitchen/sitting/dining room. “I’m sacrificing feel for durability because hardwood wouldn't work,” he says. “My family room is the reverse. I needed durability, but the feel was more important so I put in hardwood. I tell people to go home and think about it. Any product can give you the ambience.” True, solid wood is more affected by humidity. But it’s important to remember that for decades, thousands of seasonal cottages have gotten along just fine with old-fashioned wood flooring. While the boards might expand and contract a bit with the seasons, it’s generally not extreme enough to notice, and it’s an aesthetic, not structural, problem. Here are some pointers to minimize the effect of humidity changes:
Finally, for those who want wood underfoot, remember it’s a natural product and nature is full of little imperfections. A badly humped floor is one thing, but the odd gap between planks is just a reminder that what we're walking on used to be a tree. And if that doesn't work for you, there’s always linoleum.
David Zimmer, a former editor of Cottage Life, installed a wide-plank fir floor in his Huntsville home. Published in the September/October 2005 issue of Cottage Life magazine. |