Ottawa Flooring Stores Offer Beautiful Array of Wood Flooring Options

If you are searching for quality, beautiful hardwood flooring Ottawa has a good variety of retail and wholesale stores that can help you make the right choices for your home improvement needs.

Also in Ottawa, laminate flooring is an excellent, economical alternative to hardwood flooring. It offers the look of wood flooring but at less expense and is available in a wide variety of colors to suit your tastes and home décor.

To simplify your selection of hardwood flooring, Ottawa flooring specialists can share with you the benefits of each type of hardwood flooring and which would be best for your particular needs.

There are many variables to consider when choosing a wood floor. Ottawa flooring stores stock dozens of species of wood flooring, from domestic woods like maple, oak and walnut, to exotic woods like mahogany and Brazilian cherry. Each species has its unique grain pattern and coloring, from light to dark.

You can broaden the palette of colors to choose from by selecting unfinished wood flooring, which you can stain and finish achieving the look you want after the floor has been installed. Or, if you prefer, there's a wide variety of prefinished hardwood flooring. Ottawa flooring stores also stock matching prefinished molding.

Wood species also vary in degree of hardness, so your selection of hardwood flooring will, to a degree, depending on what room or area of the house you will be furnishing. You'll want to choose denser woods in high traffic areas of your home, such as hallways or more frequently used rooms like family rooms. Red oak is an example of a good choice for a well-traveled area of your home.

Another factor that can influence your decision is whether you want to install the flooring yourself. If you do, then locking, or floating, hardwood flooring is the choice for you. That's because its locking tongue and groove design makes installation relatively easy. It doesn't even require glue, nails or staples.

Another option for a wood floor Ottawa flooring stores carry is parquet flooring. This flooring features geometrically shaped strips of wood that will give your home a distinctively creative, artistic look.

A trend in wood flooring is planks three inches or wider. More homeowners like the look it offers as it makes the beauty of the wood stand out more.

Another type of wood floor Ottawa flooring stores offer is engineered wood. It is real wood, but manufactured with three to nine layers of wood veneers on top of an underlying wood that be of the same or different species as the veneer. Its advantage is that it is less susceptible to moisture than solid wood. Some kinds of engineered wood can be sanded and refinished -- just not as many times as solid wood.

The veneer of engineered floors is real hardwood, unlike laminate flooring, which has a printed veneer that can look like natural wood, tile or stone. In Ottawa, laminate flooring offers the advantages of easy installation, durability for high traffic areas, ease of maintenance and cleaning and affordability.

Also in Ottawa, laminate flooring can be installed over a variety of surfaces, such as tile and wood. It features an interlocking design that makes installation easy.