Ready for Wide Plank Flooring?

So, is wide plank flooring in or not?

Fashions in wood flooring come and go, and one of the biggest stars in recent years has been wide plank flooring.  Imagine flooring that come in widths between 3.5 inches and 8 inches (or even up to 10 inches and sometimes even wider), and you’ve got a good picture of wood wide-plank flooring.  We’re also talking thicker planks, on the whole, with 3/4 inch being a standard thickness.

Plain-Sawn Only

Now, if you’re shopping for that denser, better-quality quarter-sawn plank flooring…well, you won’t find it.  Plain-sawn is the only variety of plank flooring, and if you look at a diagram of quarter sawn vs. plain sawn, you’ll see why:  you simply cannot accommodate the needed width of wide-plank flooring in these quarter sections.

Very Wide-Planks are Face-Screwed

You’ll also find that wide plank flooring is often (but not always) fastened on the face, with planks in the five inches or greater range needing to be screwed into the subfloor.  These screws are then covered over with wood plugs.

Wide plank flooring has grown up and met the 21st century.  There was a time that the only kind of wood plank flooring you could find was salvaged wood from barns and old factories.  While this kind of wide-plank is still valuable and sought-after, you now find flooring manufacturers producing wide plank for the general market with some consumer-friendly attributes as:

• Pre-finished
• Tongue-and-groove nailable
• Shorter wide plank boards for easier installation

Pros and Cons of Wide Plank Flooring

Well, nothing is perfect, and especially not wide plank flooring.  In my humble opinion, wide plank flooring has a few good points, but more bad points that out weigh the good.

Good

1. Very cool and distinctive.
2. Fewer seams than narrower-strip wood flooring.
3. A “green” building product–can use salvaged wood.

Bad

1. Expensive; terribly expensive.
2. The face-nailing problem mentioned above.
3. Hard to obtain.
4. Many floor installers don’t want to deal with real wide-plank flooring.
5. Gaps develop over time.