Choose the Best Wooden Floor for Your Living Room

A beautiful hardwood floor can complement every living room and open a window of opportunities of achieving creating different styles and interiors as well as an atmosphere of elegance, cosiness, and warmth. Floors that are made out of real wood are not only durable and long-lasting, but they also contribute to creating an atmosphere of comfort and enjoying a lot of functionality and beauty. Since real wood flooring is available in a really impressive variety of wood species, colours, styles, designs, patterns, textures, and types, you are really spoilt for choice when you are choosing a wooden floor for your living room. Overall, choosing the right wooden floor for your living room is a matter of personal preferences and what you like and enjoy the most. However, in this article, we will make sure to provide you with some ideas and recommendations in order to help you choose the best real wood floor for your living room, so stay tuned.

Real wood flooring has the potential to become the statement piece of the interior of every room and dictate the overall style and atmosphere of the room. It is one of the most important if not the most important aspects of the interior of every room and it can stand out with beauty and elegance or blend seamlessly with the rest of the interior to ensure more harmony and tranquillity in the room. Whether you will make a bolder and more distinctive choice or you would choose a more classic and safe option, real wood flooring will certainly add a lot of character to your living room space along with a lot of charm, beauty, durability, cosiness, functionality, and comfort. Here are the main aspects you would like to consider when choosing a wooden floor for your living room.

Wood Species

Real wood floors are available in a bunch of different wood species. Different wood species come with different characteristics and in different natural colours, textures, grains, and even natural patterns. This pretty much means that you can find the exact wood species that will complement the interior of your living room. In addition, it is important to choose the wood species for your living room depending on the amount of high traffic and usage expected in this part of your home. Normally, living rooms are subject to high traffic, they are these areas of the home that are used on an everyday basis and by every member of the household.

Therefore, you want to choose wood species that are naturally harder, more durable and robust. Suitable wood species for the living room are oak, walnut, and ash, which are pretty hard and strong wood species that are highly stress- and impact resistant. Other options you can consider as medium-hard wood species are maple, cherry, and birch. However, it is recommended to avoid choosing softer wood species as there is a higher risk of scratching and the occurrence of dents and marks.

Type of Wood Flooring

Real wood floors come in three main categories when it comes to their type – solid wood flooring, engineered wood flooring, and parquet. When it comes to choosing the right type of wood flooring for your living room, thankfully, you can choose between these three main types. In general, solid wood flooring is not recommended in rooms and areas of the house where the floor could be subject to issues caused by increased indoor moisture content, humidity and temperature fluctuations.

Moisture and temperature fluctuations can cause some serious damage to solid wood flooring, making the wooden floorboards contract, expand, and shrink, which can lead to a number of issues that are sometimes beyond repair. Therefore, engineered wood flooring is created with its advanced and innovative structure of crisscrossed layers in its core that make the floorboards less prone to moisture damage and contracting and more moisture- and impact-resistant.

However, since your living room is usually not a space where increased humidity and temperature fluctuations are expected, you can choose both solid wood and engineered wood flooring for the area. The choice will be determined by your personal preferences and budget. Furthermore, you can opt for parquet flooring and its classic old-world charm for adding character to the room and making the place look more formal thanks to the beauty of the parquet pattern.

Installation Method

The main methods of installation of real wood flooring are either nailing down the floorboards, glueing them down, or the floating installation method. Whether one of these methods will be chosen or the other depends on a number of factors.

Generally, the type of installation that will be most suitable for your living room floor depends on the type of flooring as well as the type of subfloor. For example, solid wood floors and parquet are usually installed glued down to the concrete subfloor and nailed down to the wooden or plywood subfloor.

However, engineered wood flooring can be also installed the floating way, which provides you with a certain degree of flexibility and comfort, because you can have your engineered wood floor installed even on top of subfloors that cannot be completely leveled for some reason as well as on top of an underfloor heating system.

Colour

When it comes to wood floor colours, you are definitely spoilt for choice. Naturally, different wood floor species come in different natural colours, some of them being naturally super light almost white while others being naturally almost black and super eye-catching. In addition, every wooden floor can be additionally treated by professionals and its natural colour could be completely transformed and changed.

Therefore, when choosing a real wood floor that best suits the interior of your living room, you will certainly find the best match with a plethora of colours to choose from. The colour of the wooden flooring you will choose is strictly down to your personal preferences and what will suit the rest of the interior of the room according to your taste and what you find attractive. Generally, it is recommended to choose lighter wood floors for smaller living rooms as the light colour of your floor will visually make the room appear more spacious.

Grade

Wooden floorboards are available in four main categories of grades, which determine the way the floorboards look but not their condition or how durable they are. The wood floor grade choice will be a matter of personal taste and preferences entirely.

On one side of the spectrum is the prime grade, which means that the floorboards will come with minimal colour variation as well as a minimal natural pattern that includes knots and swirls, etc. There will also be a minimal amount of sapwood if any at all. Therefore, prime grade wood flooring is chosen for creating simple and airy interiors on the minimalistic side.

On the other side of the spectrum is the rustic grade that comes with the most colour variation as well as unique natural patterns and a significant presence of sapwood, knots, swirls, etc. The rustic grade wood flooring is often chosen for adding character to the interior style of the space, making the floor the focal point of the room and the statement piece of the interior.

Floorboard Sizes

Different floorboards are available in different sizes, lengths, and widths. Once again, the size and format of floorboards you are going to choose to depend on your personal preferences. Normally, wider and larger floorboards are chosen for smaller spaces because they make every room appear more spacious and larger. They also suit to less formal interiors, so if you want to achieve a farmhouse interior style for your living room, for example, wider and larger floorboards are a good choice. On the other hand, smaller and narrower floorboards are a great way to create a unique and intriguing flooring look that can make the floor the statement piece and focal point of the room.

Direction of Installation

When it comes to wooden floors, you can even choose the direction of installation of the floorboards, which is one more opportunity to create a unique ad attractive wood flooring style that best suits the rest of the interior. Generally, as a rule of thumb, floorboards are usually installed parallel to the main source of natural light in the room, which creates an optical illusion of a larger and more spacious room. However, this does not mean that you have to have your wooden floorboards installed in this exact direction.

Experimenting with the direction of installation can make the room look absolutely different and interesting, therefore, you are always recommended to discuss your options with your reliable wood floor installation specialist and choose the best option available, However, keep in mind that the direction of installation of the floorboards could also be determined by the subfloor and sometimes for the better structural integrity of the floor only one direction of installation is available. Therefore, always make sure to discuss with a specialist first.