Important Wood Flooring Facts

Wood flooring has a persona all its own. Ask any homeowner who has had wood flooring for any length of time, and you’ll hear the same things. It’s elegant, classic, timeless, and goes with just about any design theme. It’s hard to replace wood flooring with anything else once you’ve experienced it for yourself. And gone are the days of sanding and refinishing a wood floor after a few years of common traffic in a home. Today's wood flooring will last you a lifetime, literally!

At Main Place, we've been installing beautiful wood floors for over 30 years with the kind of craftmanship you and your new wood floor deserve. Coupled with our staunch dedication to seeing the complete satisfaction of our customers, we'll work with you through the entire process to help you transform your home. We invite you to come visit our showroom in Cottonwood, AZ with your ideas and questions, and to see our full line of flooring.

There are many options associated with choosing wood flooring for your home. The best place to start is with the particular wood style that fits your home. Your flooring professional will ask a series of questions to better understand your needs. Those questions might include:

• What's the style and feel within you home?
• What are the existing or future color themes?
• What is the foot traffic like throughout your home?
• Do you have children or pets?
• Are you worried that spills might be a factor to consider?
• In what rooms would you like to install this flooring?

These are just a few of the questions that will help us better understand your needs.

The primary influence upon the style of wood is the finish. Today, you can have a wide variety of finishes on your floor. The finish can be a traditional smooth surface with gloss levels from high gloss to matte. The brushed finish has become one of the most popular finishes of the past few years and expected to continue into the future. This surface is flat with medium texture and almost always in a matte finish. The brushed finish is easy to maintain and gives a warmth to any room. Brushed floors are available in wide plank widths, and depending on the amount of texturing, can be contemporary and urban, as well as old world and rustic. The final style to mention is the hand-scraped wood floor finish. Handscraped wood flooring is often used to maintain a more vintage, causal look and feel. This style is also the easiest to maintain since any inadvertent scuffing, or even gouges in the handscraped floor, just add additional character to the floor and make it even more unique than it ever was. Handscraped floors come in medium to very low gloss and plank widths from 4" up to 8" in some products. Handscraped floors also tend to be the lowest in cost due to the more cooperative surface requirements of the wood.

Many people from other parts of the United States are familiar with solid hardwood flooring. However in Northern Arizona, and many other western states, Engineered wood flooring is the more appropriate plank construction. Engineered wood flooring is constructed in a way that performs optimally in our climate. As the home environment experiences humidity swings, all wood, especially your wood floor, expands and contracts. As we experience prolonged periods of low humidity, the wood dries out causing almost unnoticeable shrinking. Then when we experience heavy rains the wood acts like a sponge and absorbs mass amounts of moisture causing an expansion of the wood flooring over an extended horizontal surface. Too great of contractions and you experience gapping in-between planks. Too much expansion and your floor can run out of room to expand at the walls and start to rise like a speed bump. These expansions and contractions are effectively reduced substantially by the use of engineered layering of the wood plank composition. We'll tell you and show you more about this when you visit our showroom and we'll explore all the styles and colors that will change your home forever.

We service the areas of Cottonwood, Sedona, Jerome, Clarkdale, Cornville, Village of Oak Creek and Verde Valley, and we would love the opportunity to serve you as well.