| The primary mission of low-cost flooring suppliers is to reduce manufacturing costs so they can charge less-primarily by sacrificing quality. Their products may appear roughly similar at first glance, and that's their goal-but there are critical differences. |
| Below are six important factors for you to consider when buying hardwood flooring. Be sure to weigh them carefully before you move ahead with a purchase so critical to the value and beauty of your home... |
#1 - Discount Wood Flooring or Fine Wood Flooring? |
| Discount flooring liquidators and home improvement stores often choose to sacrifice the quality of wood or workmanship to reduce their manufacturing cost. Don’t be fooled if the discount wood flooring appears roughly similar to fine wood flooring at the first glance. Here are important things to consider: |
| Hand-Scraped Flooring vs. Machine Scraping? Most hardwood flooring advertised as hand-scraped these days isn’t hand-scraped at all—it’s scraped by machines to appear hand-scraped. The patterns and marks are repetitive, and look “fake” when spread across your floor at home. Bella Cera flooring, on the other hand, is truly hand-scraped flooring. Hardwood floor artisans, personally trained by a world-renowned expert, “read” each board and use hand tools to bring out its unique personality with distinctive, natural-looking hardwood characteristics. |
| Floor Finish. Floor finish is a critically important step for hardwood flooring. The finish must be durable and elastic to resist scratching and wear, without clouding the natural grain and color of the wood. A poor floor finish can make even the most beautiful wood look dull. Quality hardwood flooring has a high-quality floor finish, with a fine transparency that accentuates the natural beauty of the wood grain. Cheap hardwood floor finishes obscure the natural grain of the wood with a cloudy coating; scratches on the wood floor make this whitish coating readily apparent. Cheap hardwood floor finishes are also inconsistent in color, and can have rough surfaces with small raised bumps. |
Hardwood Floor Creaking. With quality hardwood flooring, the gap between the “tongues” on board edges and the grooves they fit into is less than 0.15 MM. This tight attachment eliminates the creaking you find with cheap hardwood flooring when it is walked upon. |
| Precision Milling. Quality hardwood flooring is milled using expensive, high-end machines for extreme precision and consistency in height, length, width, edges and ends. Bargain flooring is manufactured using less expensive and precise machines, resulting in gaps between board edges and ends, as well as differences in thickness. |
| Floor Glue Safety. Quality. Hardwood flooring uses Taier E1 glue between layers, with a very low level of formaldehyde. Bella Cera flooring, for example, conforms to CARB, with a formaldehyde level far below its guidelines. Vapors from cheap glues can be harmful to your health! |
| Engineered Flooring. Good quality engineered hardwoods use a veneer core with higher-quality tropical woods alternately layered in a crisscross pattern, for superior weight-bearing strength and screw-holding ability. The gap between each layer should measure less than 1mm. A quality engineered floor has higher density and is more durable than cheap plywoods, regardless of how similar they look on the surface. Learn about engineered flooring vs. solid wood flooring here. |
| Wear Layer. With quality hardwood flooring, you can count on the exact thickness claimed for its wear layer. But as thinner wear layers are less expensive to produce, cheap flooring is often found to have a wear layer that is thinner than what is claimed. |
| Authentic Wood Species. Cheap flooring often uses deceptive wood species names, such as “walnut” that’s really elm stained a walnut color, or “mahogany” that’s Chinese walnut stained a mahogany color. With fine wood flooring such as Bella Cera, the wood that’s named is the wood you get. |
| Longer Wood Plank Length. Long planks are more expensive to produce, but make a more beautiful floor. Short boards can look like shoeboxes when placed in a floor. Cheap wood flooring typically includes too many short planks, with boards as small as one foot in length. But quality hardwood flooring uses longer planks. Bella Cera, for example, includes boards up to seven feet in length, with the average being over three feet. |
| Hardwood Floor Defect Rate. Cheap flooring has a higher rate of defects. Bella Cera inspects every board and discards those with unattractive defects |
| Floor Consistency. Cheap flooring is plagued with inconsistency in color, grain, texture and scraping. Our quality control experts match each batch for consistency in these important features. |
#2 - Flooring Stores vs. Home Improvement Stores and Hardwood Liquidators |
| Hardwood floor quality is the paramount difference between a quality flooring store and a lumber liquidator or home improvement store. But there are other important differences as well: |
Hardwood Floor Expertise. Many issues come up in choosing flooring that simply can't be accurately answered by lightly-trained clerks in stores that also sell refrigerators, hammers and plants. Their expertise in the choice of wood for particular areas of your house, climate considerations and design will be minimal at best. But at a flooring store, you'll generally find specialists with many years of experience in hardwood floor selection and design. Flooring is a significant investment, and it matters where you buy it! |
Flooring Selection. Because it's all they sell, flooring stores are committed to presenting the widest possible selection of floors, in the latest styles and colors as well as classic ones. Home improvement stores and hardware liquidators typically carry lower-quality flooring, and flooring they can sell in mass quantities. It may be okay for a rental property, but probably not for your home. They also typically offer very limited choices in terms of color and style. |
Hardwood Floor Warranty. Only fine hardwood floor manufacturers such as Bella Cera offer long warranties, solid repair policies and money-back guarantees. Lower-quality flooring often goes to the home improvement stores and lumber liquidators as discount or close-out products (often unbeknownst to you), and you may be out of luck if you run into problems. |
Hardwood Floor Installation. Professional hardwood flooring stores usually work with a certified professional installer, so you avoid the headaches of finding your own installer or experiencing a poor floor installation. Just one example: without proper acclimation, floorboards can experience cupping, or even delamination. And there are many more potential pitfalls of a poor hardwood floor installation. |
#3 - Hardwood Floors vs. Carpet, Vinyl or Laminage Floors |
| Flooring comes in four main varieties: hardwood flooring, carpeting, sheet vinyl flooring and laminate flooring. For many reasons, hardwood flooring makes the best choice: |
Superior Value of Hardwood Flooring. Of the four flooring choices, only hardwood flooring will add value to your home—substantial value. If you sell your house someday, you probably won’t recoup any money you’ve spent on carpeting, laminate or vinyl flooring. Here is why. |
Carpeting. Carpeting can easily be more expensive in the long run than hardwood flooring. Carpets wear out and must be replaced, especially in high traffic areas like stairs, hallways, doorways and children’s rooms. They also get dirty and stained. Over time, the cost of installing two sets of wall-to-wall carpet will equal the cost of a one-time quality hardwood floor installation. |
Laminate Flooring. Laminate flooring is not much different. It’s a multi-layer synthetic flooring product, fused together with a lamination process. Laminate flooring simulates wood or stone, with a photographic applique layer under a clear protective layer. Laminates add no value to a home. They can also fade in direct light, warp in heat or when exposed to moisture, and, like carpeting, they have to be replaced. |
#4 - Fixed vs. Variable Width Flooring Planks |
| Most flooring is sold in planks of a single width. But today, many homeowners and designers are mixing flooring planks of different widths, achieving striking effects. Variable-width flooring allows you to mix wood planks of 4, 5 and 6 inches together to create a unique and stylish look. To complement the scale of your rooms, you can emphasize the 5-inch and 6-inch planks in larger rooms, and 4-inch and 5-inch planks in smaller ones. Or mix the sizes randomly and creatively for all sorts of interesting effects. You can take advantage of the variable widths to play up architectural features of a room, such as a bay window, door, alcove or fireplace. |
| And, you can use them with modern wall colors, drapes, throws and furnishings to create a modern eclectic look. With variable-width flooring, you can let your creativity be your guide |
#5 - Engineeered Flooring vs. Solid Planks |
| We produce both engineered hardwood flooring and solid hardwood flooring for most of our customers – so we’re not biased. For most home applications, however, engineered hardwoods such as Bella Cera are a better choice than solid hardwoods. |
| Engineered hardwoods look exactly the same as solid wood. But there are important differences.Engineered flooring is composed of three to seven cross-stacked layers (Bella Cera uses seven). This makes it impervious to humidity and moisture, unlike a strip of solid wood. It also allows for the use of longer planks--providing not only a more desirable look, but also resistance to bending or bowing, as can happen with longer solid planks. |
| Solid planks can also suffer from expansion and contraction in changing seasons, leaving unsightly gaps, as well as “cupping” from moisture and shrinkage over a long period of time. |
| Engineered flooring is more flexible in application as well. It can be directly glued down on a concrete slab, or stapled to a wood sub-floor. And, it can be installed on any grade level. As a result, engineered floors are well suited to almost every room in the house, including kitchens and dry basements, and offer superior durability in addition to uncompromised beauty. |
#6 - Choosing A Wood Species |
| The most important factor in choosing a wood species is, of course, the appearance. While the stains and finishes add variability to them, different woods can complement modern, classic, rustic or other types of settings. For example, maple has a more subtle, elegant look, while hickory has a more unique and “outspoken” appearance. The experts in a fine flooring store can help you make the right choices. |
| There are subtle differences as well. For example, Big Leaf Acacia features less character, with a plain grain, fewer knots and wider age circles, while the Small Leaf Acacia that Bella Cera uses is full of character, with more knots and a swirling grain. It costs us more, but it makes a prettier floor. |
| In addition to appearance, you should also consider durability, moisture-resistance and hardness, depending on the area of the home where the flooring will be placed. Our Small Leaf Acacia, for example has higher density, so it’s a lot harder, where Big Leaf Acacia has lower density, so it’s softer and lighter. Your in-store flooring expert can help you make the right decisions. |
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