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CRITICAL THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN BUYING HARDWOOD FLOORING

http://www.bellacerafloors.com/hardwood-flooring/100-Hand-Scraped-hardwood-flooring.aspx ..... 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.Important factors for you to consider when buying hardwood flooring.

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CRITICAL THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN BUYING HARDWOOD FLOORING

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  1. CRITICAL THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN BUYING HARDWOOD FLOORING

  2. Don't be fooled by cheap flooring. • 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. 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!

  3. Discount Wood Flooring or Fine Wood Flooring?

  4. Discount flooring liquidators and home improvement stores often choose to sacrifice the quality of wood or workmanship to reduce their manufacturing cost.  Here are important things to consider: Hand-Scraped Flooring vs. Machine Scraping Floor Finish Hardwood Floor Creaking Precision Milling Floor Glue Safety Engineered Flooring Wear Layer Longer Wood Plank Length Hardwood Floor Defect Rate Floor Consistency

  5. 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.

  6. Bella Cera Flooring.  Lots of hardwood flooring brands these days deceptively claim their products are "hand-scraped" when they're actually scraped by lightly-trained workers using machines. A discerning consumer can easily tell the difference.  It's worse on a hardwood floor, where the broad expanse makes the repetition even more obvious, and over time, tiresome to the eye. What might be acceptable to you when you look at a few boards in a store might not be when it's spread across your living room. There are no machines, no assembly lines, no large quantities being pushed through quickly to save time and money. Each flooring plank is individually inspected for its unique patterns, grain and colorations, and hand-carved and scraped to complement its beautiful marks of individuality. No two floor boards are the same! When in a flooring store, please compare our true hand-scraped hardwood flooring to typical machine-scraped hardwood flooring. The difference is obvious!

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. The finish of fine wood flooring is critically important to both its appearance and maintainability. It should protect the wood floor while preserving the fine details of its character: its grain, patterns and subtle colorations, which you will grow to love over time. A mediocre floor finish will cloud these subtle yet beautiful details. • Intense, crystal clarity that won't go yellow over time, as some finishes will• excellent hardness for superb protection• Enhanced UV protection to protect against sun-bleaching of your hardwood floor• Environmentally friendly: HAPs-free and zero VOCs making it one of the greenest finishes on the market

  10. 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.

  11. 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. 

  12. 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. • 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.

  13. Hardwood Floor Defect Rate Floor Consistency Cheap flooring has a higher rate of defects. Bella Cera inspects every board and discards those with unattractive defects 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.

  14. Bella Cera Hardwood Floors400 Oyster Point Blvd, Suite 115So. San Francisco, CA 94080Tel.866.599.7999Fax.650.873.4316 www.bellacerafloors.com/hardwood-flooring/100-Hand-Scraped-hardwood-flooring.aspx

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