Wood floor and alternatives

Solid hardwood floors are great, although they can be expensive. Usually, they are three quarters of an inch thick, and between three and seven inches wide. They can be sanded and refinished for generations — consider them an investment in your home.

Like all natural wood, your hardwood floors will react to moisture, and buckle or split if not correctly installed by an experienced person.

Before he will do the job, a good installer will insist that the flooring sit for four or five days in the house so that it becomes acclimatized. Also, ask him what he puts under the planks for backing, and how much room he allows for movement along the edges of the room.

Because the floor is nailed down one plank at a time, the installer has to be experienced enough to have developed a good "feel" for the wood so he doesn't install it too tight or too loose. Wood floors need expansion gaps to allow for swelling in humid weather and shrinkage in dry winters. There is an art to the installation that only comes with experience.

Engineered wood

This is "real" hardwood flooring made up of layers of wood stacked and bonded under heat and pressure. It's very strong and stable, resists warping and cupping, and doesn't react to changes in humidity and temperature the way solid wood can. The top layer is thick enough to be sanded and refinished several times, so it will last, too. I really like this product — especially in situations where the joists are wide apart or the subfloor isn't tongue-in-groove plywood. It provides additional strength and stability.

Laminate flooring

Laminate, or "click" flooring, is a less costly product, and popular because it's supposed to be easy to install. It's called "click" because it comes in panels with male and female edges that, when you connect them, they "click" together, making nailing individual boards unnecessary.

There are different grades of laminate flooring. Some are made with a natural wood veneer top layer backed by plywood. Some cheaper ones are just cellulite paper saturated with resins made to look like wood.

If you are going to buy click flooring, you better ask a lot of questions and look closely at the samples. How thick is the veneer? Is the backing waterproof? How big are the panels? Do the panels have connectors on the ends as well as the sides?

And don't take terms like "real wood," "100 per cent natural product" and "environmentally friendly" at face value. They need to be challenged. Exactly how much of the product is real wood? What is "natural" about this product? What makes it so "environmentally friendly"?

Installation is still important with laminate floors — maybe even more so. The ones that need gluing are messy to install. You can't install the cheap stuff on anything but a perfectly flat floor unless you don't care if it bounces and pops as you walk on it. Replacing a panel is tricky and the low-end products are so delicate that they are hard to repair seamlessly. And like real wood flooring, it still needs a proper substrate.

'Green' wood flooring

The latest interest in green products has created a wave of flooring innovation and choice for homeowners. The high-profile "green" flooring right now is bamboo.

Bamboo is a fast-growing grass that is easily renewed, which makes it a better environmental option than hardwood, which grows slowly. That's a big selling point to me — but I also love the look.

It's also very tough — easily as tough as any hardwood. While bamboo is a great green hardwood flooring option, it won't save you much money; it costs about the same as hardwood flooring.

Cork floors have been around a long time, but now they are being sold as a "green" product because cork can be harvested over and over again from the same tree for hundreds of years. Cork provides the best of many worlds — it's soft and comfortable, looks good, stands up to hard use, and deserves its reputation for being an environmental product.

Recycled flooring

A company called Jelinek Cork actually recycles wine-bottle corks and turns them into flooring, giving you the double whammy of a renewable and a recycled resource. The corks are cut into discs about a quarter of an inch thick and glued onto a backing in a mosaic pattern. The tiles are then glued and grouted like ceramic tile.

Recycling wood flooring is another option that I'm seeing more often. Barns and old homes are being torn down and the wood used to make rustic flooring, or the original flooring is salvaged and resold.

Some companies are making a business out of recovering the estimated 700 million logs sitting at the bottom of the Ottawa River for the last 100 years. That would be a wooden floor I'd love to have in my home — it would have warmth, character, a sense of history, and be environmentally friendly

(prepared by Mike Holmes/Globe & Mail)