What is Longstrip Flooring?

Longstrip flooring sounds pretty impressive, doesn’t it?  Think you’ll be willing to fork over a few extra bucks for this fancy longstrip wood flooring?

That’s what I thought, until I looked into the matter a little closer…

What I had imagined was not reality.  As you might know, when you order up wood flooring, you often are surprised to open up the box and find what seems like millions of short strips of flooring, some as short as four or five inches.  There is a good side and a bad side to these short boards…

That bad thing about these short floorboards (other than the potential for a heart attack when you open the box) is that you increase the number of seams you have in your flooring.  The good thing is that these short strips mean less wasted flooring material.

OK, What Is Longstrip Flooring?

So, longstrip flooring sounds like an unbeatable deal.  As it turns out, longstrip does not mean 14 foot long floorboards.  It means lots of little floorboards bound together into a single unit, and this single unit is the long strip.

Longstrip tends to be about 9/16 thick x 7-1/2 wide and eight feet long.  So, in a sense, longstrip still does come in long strips.  Eight feet is pretty good; you don’t find those lengths with most solid hardwood.

You’ll find that the finish layer–the visible layer–contains three rows of strips side by side.  A single longstrip can have as many as 35 smaller pieces.

Because of longstrip flooring’s construction method, it is available only as engineered wood.  I guess that’s pretty obvious; but solid hardwood is simply solid hardwood, no base or backer pieces at all.  With longstrip, it’s the backer board that holds the unit together.