Matching Unfinished Solid Hardwood Flooring To Your Interior

If you are in the process of planning a re-flooring project, we’re sure you’ll agree that it’s an exciting journey. However, there are so many choices available online as well as on the High Street, it can become overwhelming if you’re not careful. Making the right choice calls for an open mind, a good deal of imagination and a certain amount of courage.

What we often find at Wood and Beyond is that clients who really are unsure of what they are looking for are often best to opt for an unfinished solid hardwood flooring option. As the name suggests, unfinished solid hardwood flooring gets delivered to you in its natural state. It has no finish on it whatsoever. No matter whether you are shopping around for solid or engineered wood flooring, an unfinished solution means that you don’t have to commit to a final look until your floor is in place. And even then, once it is in place, you can still play around with small test-spots of different finishes (on discrete areas of the floor of course) to see what might work best for you.

Solid wood flooring is a beautiful and natural product. Made, as the name suggests, from planks of solid wood and nothing else, it may be that you opt for oak, maple, walnut or teak? It really doesn’t matter; you are getting a 100% natural product. All of that said, solid wood flooring isn’t ideally suited to every different environment in the home. Basically, anywhere in the home where there is a chance that temperatures and moisture levels could fluctuate, you should avoid solid wood flooring. This is because solid wood is a natural product and it expands and contracts when temperatures and moisture levels rise and fall.

When solid wood takes in moisture or warms up it expands which means that your floor boards become ever so slightly bigger than they were before the environmental change. Once temperatures fall again or moisture levels reduce, they shrink again. This in itself isn’t a major problem, but when you have solid wood floor boards nicely butted up against one another and this happens it can cause unsightly gaps to occur in the floor and it can even cause the boards to cup or bow, which means they will no longer lie nicely flat. So, whatever your situation, it’s worth bearing in mind that anywhere in the home where you have fluctuating temperatures and, or moisture levels, solid hardwood flooring is best avoided. It’s also best avoided over under floor heating.

So, once you’ve established that solid hardwood flooring will work in your chosen room, and you’ve plumped for an unfinished option, how do you go about matching it up with your interior? Here are three of the principle questions you should ask yourself.

Footfall? If you are likely to have high or heavy footfall, this will (or at least should) affect your choice of finish. In the likes of a hallway, where everyone, and maybe even their dog is coming through the space, it’s a good idea to apply a hard-wearing finish to protect your floor from what it will have to face up to every day.

Colour? It may be that you want a light coloured floor or you might be keen to plump for one of the highly fashionable, almost black colours? Either way, with an unfinished floor you’ll be able to test and try before you commit. This is one of the great things about unfinished solid wood flooring because you can see it in place before you need to commit to the overall colour you’re going to choose.

Shine or matt? There’s no getting away from the fact that a matt solid hardwood floor tends to have a more natural look than a highly shiny wood floor. That said, both can look stunning in the right situation. So, before you choose, with the luxury of an unfinished solution, you can stand back and take a good hard look at your floor in situ before you attack it with either an oil or a lacquer.

So there you have it – the real pros and cons of choosing an unfinished solid hardwood floor and matching it up with your interior after you’ve laid it. If you are debating over a prefinished and an unfinished solid hardwood floor, why not get in touch so we can help you make the very best decision for your project? After all, it costs nothing to chat.