Solid or Engineered Flooring

We’ve made selecting a Northern Wide Plank specialty wood floor as simple as possible. Every Northern Wide Plank floor offers unique characteristics that compliment and define the spaces they create. Northern’s engineered wood floors embody your individual style and taste. They are the one constant in any interior design, connecting both form and function with the beauty and elegance that can only be found in natural wide plank wood flooring.

We get this question a lot. Which one is better… solid or engineered flooring? SOLID FLOORING Solid wood flooring is sometimes thought of as being more prestigious because it's 100% natural all the way through. Solid flooring being one complete piece of natural wood makes it more sensitive to moisture and humidity changes. It is not unusual for solid flooring to expand and contract during seasonal changes, and if humidity levels are not kept properly controlled, substantial checking, gapping and/or cupping may occur from season to season. Considering your typical wide plank is 7" in width, this makes the plank structure even more sensitive and likely to have substantial movement with seasonal changes.

ENGINEERED FLOORING Over the years, engineered flooring garnered a bad reputation in some circles. Some people equated it as ‘inferior’ in quality but this simply isn’t true, like many products it depends on how it is made. At Northern Wide Plank, we prove that our engineered wood flooring is the opposite of inferior. Our engineering formula is one that involves extensive detail and chemistry that results in a perfectly balanced engineered wood plank. One that offers the same wear layer as our solid format, and is noticeably better in every aspect from the ease of installation right down to the feeling of stability as you walk across the floor every day. Unlike Solid flooring which only uses one solid piece of wood; engineered floors have multiple layers of wood cross grain laminated with a hardwood lamella on top for superior strength. This cross-layering effect enables the floor to be more stable and have greater resistance to moisture when compared to Solid flooring. Some benefits to engineered flooring include:

• Beautiful handcrafted wide plank floors with the same look and feel as a solid floor.
• Ideal for in floor radiant heating.
• The same wear layer thickness as solid wood flooring with equal lifetime serviceability.
• Greater stability to resist cupping and gapping of the floor caused by seasonal changes in humidity.
• A sustainable solution that uses less of our finite resources such as antique timbers.