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Wood is a natural material. They do not go out of fashion and they are unique. Natural wood has enough strength, long life, good thermal and sound insulating quality. Wood classified as hard and soft wood.
Hard wood: Is from broad leaves tree. In cold and winter season they drop leaves example teak, oak, maple, walnut and many. Hard woods are harder, finer in grains, more attractive and expensive. These are used for flooring.
Soft wood: Is from those trees with needle like leaves and retain leaves throughout the year example pine, cedar, redwood and many. They are less expensive, easier to work and less suitable for fine finish.
Wood flooring is not much used for ground floor in India. However, it is used for dancing halls, and tournament hall and auditoriums. The use of timber floor is best suited for buildings in hill station or in the localities where the climate is cold. Hard wood floors are elastic in nature and possess enough resistance to wear. It is oldest type of resilient flooring. Oak and hard maple have very little resilience while the soft wood viz.,pine has a more. New wood floor products often are combined with impregnated resins that also determine their resiliency. Wood flooring is a good insulator combating heat loss and noise. Wood floor used only for special purpose and not very common in Indian houses.
Wood flooring can be provided in different ways they are as follows.
- Strip flooring: made of long and narrow and their strips of timber in variety of widths and thickness
- Planked flooring: Wider planks of 12 inch wide are used for flooring.
- Block flooring: Consists of short but thicker wood blocks which are laid in suitable design.
- Parquet flooring: Similar to block flooring except thin blocks are supported on sub floor. They are made of small pieces laid to produce geometric patterns.
Some of the newer types of wood floors come in parquet tiles with 10 mm thickness and with pre finished treatment. This type of wood floor can provide the beauty of natural wood floor. These can be laid directly on a subfloor in a manner similar to tile fixing.
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