Denver Wood Flooring

Denver wood flooring is not a product that most homeowners need much convincing to fall in love with. After all, when it comes to installing flooring in your home, there isn't another product on the market that adds more character and beauty to a living space than wood flooring in Denver. While falling for hardwood flooring is easy, selecting the right flooring for you home can be another prospect altogether. You'll be faced with choosing between different wood species, plank sizes, styles, and finishes, just to get started. That being said, studying up on your options goes a long way towards a smooth Denver wooden flooring installation on the Front Range.

Denver Wood Flooring Costs

Maybe the most important thing to know before you commit to wood flooring in Denver is cost. Installing Denver wooden flooring isn't cheap, and for good reason. You're paying for a top-notch, beautiful, and completely unique flooring material if you go with wood. In addition to that, installing a wood floor in Denver isn't easy. It takes patience, the right tools, and plenty of expertise to end up with a floor that will function as well as it looks. All that being said, the average cost of installing wooden flooring in Denver runs about $3,800, based on data collected from Front Range homeowners whose wood floor installations began as contractor referrals from ServiceMagic. The wide range of prices in materials, as well as the size of your installation, can influence the cost dramatically, however. Our books indicate that costs can fluctuate anywhere from $1,300 to $10,000 to install wood flooring in the Mile High City.

Choosing the Right Wood for Denver Wood Flooring

Perhaps the most daunting task when it comes to choosing Denver wooden flooring is deciding on the right wood for your home. It's not an easy choice, and you should take into account everything from appearance, to longevity, to price, in making your final decision. There are literally hundreds of species and sub-species to choose from, ranging from cost-effective softwoods like pine and spruce, to high dollar exotic varieties such as rosewood, cocobolo, and ebony. Obviously, appearance and your budget will play the biggest roles in the final choice you make, but you should also consult with your contractor or retailer about practical issues such as durability, scratch resistance, fading, and required maintenance before you sign the bill. Even the most beautiful wooden flooring in Denver can become a burden if it can't stand up the demands your household is going to place on it.

Choosing the Right Style for Denver Wood Flooring

Deciding on a species of wood flooring in Denver to install in your home is only the beginning. Once you've made that decision, you're going to need to decide on the style of wooden flooring in Denver that best fits your home and vision. Strip flooring generally refers to planks cut less than 2 ?" in length. Plank flooring can range anywhere from 3" on up to a foot a more in width. And parquet flooring refers to wood arranged in geometrical designs (creating a wood "tile" appearance). Beyond that, you can choose from distressed wood flooring (industry talk for "beat up"), hand-scraped wood flooring (milled by hand for a more unique texture and appearance), and engineered wood flooring if you're on a budget (composite planks topped with a real wood veneer).

Installing Denver Wood Flooring

Once you've chosen a species, and style, of Denver wood flooring, the next step is installing it. This is no easy task, and should only be tackled by an experienced home handyman or a professional experienced in the installation of wood flooring in Denver. Just to give you an idea, an average installation entails making sure the subfloor is sound and level, laying down an asphalt felt underlayment, and then installing the wood planks with, among other tools, a hammer, drill, mallet, and flooring nailer (you can rent these from an equipment retailer). Individual planks must be cut to the proper length, and then staggered to increase the stability of the floor and achieve the desired appearance. Drawing from the same surveys that allow us to estimate the cost of wooden flooring in Denver, the average installation takes about one week to complete, though small jobs can be finished in as little as two days and longer ones can take up to two weeks. Keep in mind that this data is for experienced installers working around the clock. Assuming you tackle the job on evenings and weekends, and accounting for the learning curve, a DIY job can easily take a up to a month or more to complete a large wood flooring installation.

Denver Wood Flooring: Finishing the Job

The final step of any Denver wood flooring installation is finishing the floor. There are many ways to do this, ranging from more popular polyurethane coats to shellacking your new wood flooring. These finishes can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to dry and set before your floor is ready to withstand the rigors of regular, daily use. In the end, however, your total investment, from choosing the right wood to having your floor finished properly, will result in a floor that's unrivaled in function, uniqueness, and appearance. Talk to a contractor who specializes in installing wood flooring in Denver, or a retailer who can walk you through purchase to installation, about what it's going to take to install a beautiful new wood floor in your Mile High City home.