Add Antiquity with Wide Plank Flooring

Hardwood floors are tough to beat from an aesthetic standpoint, period. But if you're looking for a little something different, you might consider wide plank flooring for your next flooring project. A wide plank floor adds an entirely different feel to a home, one of antiquity, rustic aesthetics, and times gone past, that other hardwood floors simply can't match.

What is Wide Plank?
Wide plank flooring is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of the standard 3 to 4 inch planks that make up a traditional hardwood floor, a wide plank floor can be built of planks up to a foot wide. It might sound like a triviality, but from a design perspective wide flooring plank adds an entirely different aesthetic to a room. While traditional hardwood floors bring an air of sophistication and order, a wide plank floor takes you back to earlier times. It's a symbol of antiquity, when harvested trees were big enough to mill wide planks in the first place, and when a wide wood plank meant quicker, and cheaper, installation. Smaller planks, on the other hand, symbolized sophistication and detail, and in turn communicated an air of greater wealth and status.

Wide Plank Flooring and Antique Wood
One of the biggest draws of a floor made from wide flooring plank is where the wood comes from. Wide plank style flooring is rarely made of newly harvested wood. Primarily, this is due to the fact that there are few trees left that are big enough to provide the number of wide planks necessary to supply an industry of wide plank installations. That being the case, your average wide flooring plank comes from a number of other sources. They are generally milled from recycled wood (such as old barn wood), from dead old growth trees, or from recycled old wide plank flooring. All of this means you're not just investing in a beautiful and unique, flooring choice, but in a green building material that is beneficial to the environment as well.

Wide Plank Flooring Characteristics
The fact that wide planks for flooring come from old, recycled, or reclaimed wood from old growth trees, also means that they have an appearance unrivaled in the hardwood flooring industry. Because they had so much time to develop, wood harvested from old growth trees has much more character than a new growth flooring plank. They are full of knots, grains, worm runs, and because many are recycled old flooring plank to begin with, they also sport old nail holes and the like. All these features add a character to wide plank flooring that simply isn't possible to achieve in new wood floors. If you're looking for a distinctive, head-turning, wood flooring option, wide plank floors are far and away the best option for you.

Hand-Scraped and Distressed Wide Plank Flooring
Besides natural aesthetic benefits, you can also invest in hand-scraped and distressed wide plank flooring. Hand-scraped flooring really takes you back to another era, when flooring planks were hand milled, and the planks revealed the irregularities and imperfections that came with unmechanized production. Distressed flooring is a different bag altogether. It creates the feeling of older, abused wood, but artificially. Distressed wood is created by manually beating up the wood, creating artificial fissures, cracks, worm runs, and the like, all in a modern setting. Either way, if you're looking for an antiquated look for your home, you can't beat hand scraped, or distressed flooring planks, when it comes to wood floors.

To help you choose the best wide plank floor for your home, talk to a flooring contractor or flooring supplier, experienced in selling and installing wide plank floors. For a floor that hearkens back to earlier times, you can't beat the looks of a good wide plank floor.