Wood flooring has been used for hundreds of years in castles and stately homes and is becoming more and more sought after as a healthy and stylish flooring option today. Also credited by some experts with adding value to homes, an increasing number of people are installing either solid or engineered wood flooring in their interiors. The great news is, like any flooring option, as popularity grows so does the range of options available on the market.
Oak is, without a doubt, one of the toughest woods available and, as a result is a favourite option in both furnishing and flooring. Oak trees can live for hundreds of years, making oak an exceptionally resilient, natural product. In fact, the oak tree is so synonymous with durability and longevity that it is often used as a symbol in logos to suggest these characteristics. There are several types of oak used in flooring in both the United States and in Europe. They include white oak, red oak and European oak.
Like all other solid wood floor options, oak flooring is a completely natural product, which is allergen free, environmentally friendly and suitable for recycling and re-use. It is also an incredibly flexible flooring option, which can be used to enhance both modern and traditional interiors. An easy maintenance choice, there’s no getting away from the fact that solid oak flooring, with the right care, will last in most cases, (more than) a lifetime.
Hand scraped oak flooring is an extremely popular flooring option at this moment in time. Like all things “fashion” just now, flooring which has been made to look as if it is old and like it has some sort of story to tell and heritage is highly sought after. With its vintage look, hand scraped oak flooring truly does add real charm to traditional and cutting edge interiors alike.
Hand scraping oak is an ancient treatment, dating way back to the days before mechanical wood working tools were even thought about. At this time, wood flooring was laboriously cut by hand into planks, a process which made each plank quite unique. This uneven and irregular look of years gone by is today recreated by hand scraped oak flooring. The real irony of hand scraping is that it was used years ago to make wood flooring look more regular and today it’s actually used to make uniform flooring look less uniform, more random and more hand-crafted.
A hand scraped floor will look as if it really has stood the test of time. That said, most “hand” scraping of oak nowadays is in fact carried out by machine and is used to create a whole host of different “aged” looks on oak flooring. If you’re looking for aged oak flooring and hand scraped oak flooring is out of your budget, you could also consider distressing an existing floor yourself. Distressing is a technique that, with a bit of practice, can make flooring look convincingly old. That said, distressing isn’t a task which should be taken on lightly and is best tested on an inconspicuous part of the floor before tackling the whole area.