Engineered Hardwood Flooring in Murfreesboro, TN

Murfreesboro Hardwood Flooring fits engineered hardwood for people who want real wood on top and a board that copes with a damp summer. We measure your rooms, check what sits under the old floor, and fit the boards to suit your house.

Summer damp, raised houses and boards that move less

The U.S. Forest Service's Forest Products Laboratory says wood takes on moisture from the air around it, and that the moisture left in wood tends to settle into balance with the humidity of the air around it.

We pay close attention when your house sits over a crawlspace, the low open space between the ground and the floor. A Forest Service study of 12 houses with raised wood floors found that in most of them, the wooden base under the flooring was damper in summer than in winter. It also found the air in the crawlspace held about as much water as the air outside. Those houses were in southern Louisiana, not here, but it is the reason we look under raised floors in Murfreesboro before we price a job.

The lab also says engineered flooring that comes finished from the factory keeps its size better than solid strip flooring, because its thin sheets are glued with the grain of each one turned across the last. That cuts down how much a board shrinks and swells in width as its moisture goes up and down.

What is inside an engineered board

The lab describes engineered flooring as several thin sheets of solid wood, called veneer, glued together under heat, pressure or both. Boards come with two, three, five, seven or nine sheets, and three and five are the ones you will see most.

On the boards we fit, the top sheet is the wood you walk on and see. The lab says the top, bottom and middle sheets are usually cut from different kinds of tree. After the glued panels are sanded and cut into planks, the planks get their finish at the factory, so they arrive ready to lay.

Letting the boards settle before we start

The Forest Service's Wood Handbook says to put wood down at the moisture level it will live at in the house. Its list of ways to cut down on cracks in a floor includes opening the bundles so the air inside the house reaches every side of the boards. It also says to check random boards with a moisture meter, a tool that reads how wet wood is, when they arrive and again before they go down.

We do the same on engineered jobs. We open the boxes in the rooms they are going into, take meter readings on the boards and the floor below, and wait until both sit where the board maker's instructions say they should.

Glued, nailed or floating

Which way we fit the floor depends on what is under it, and we settle that with you after we have looked:

• We can glue the boards straight onto the floor below.
• Where there is a wood floor below, we can nail or staple into it.
• Or we float them, which means the boards click to one another and rest on a thin pad, not fixed to the floor below at all.

OSHA, the federal agency for workplace safety, says wood dust becomes a possible health problem once sanding and cutting make the particles airborne, so we keep our saw away from the rooms you are living in.

We also fit engineered boards on hardwood stairs, and we use them when we replace old carpet in a carpet to hardwood job.

The formaldehyde stamp on the box

The middle layers of an engineered board are held together with glue. The EPA says composite wood products are made by binding wood strands, particles, fibers, veneers or boards with glue, and that flooring is one of the common uses. It says formaldehyde, a strong-smelling chemical found in those glues, can irritate your skin, eyes, nose and throat.

There is a federal rule for this, called TSCA Title VI. The EPA says regulated composite wood products, and goods made with them, that were made in or shipped into the U.S. after March 22, 2019 must carry a label saying they meet it. Before we fit anything, we'll find that label on the boxes with you.

Reading your quote

We give you a written price after we have measured the house. What moves that price is the size of each room, the number of doorways and corners we cut around, the boards you choose, and whether we glue, nail or float them. We also add in lifting the old floor and fixing any soft or uneven spots in the floor below.

Whoever you hire, make sure the written quote shows:

• The brand, wood type, board width and how thick the top wood layer is.
• The way the boards will be fixed down, and what goes underneath them.
• How and when the boards and the floor below will be moisture tested.
• What happens, and what it costs, if the floor below needs fixing.
• Who moves the furniture and who takes the old flooring away.
• The trim or strip that will finish each doorway where the wood meets tile or carpet.

Questions about engineered hardwood flooring in Murfreesboro

Book a measure for engineered hardwood

Call us, or fill in the quote form with your ZIP code and the rooms you have in mind. We'll come out, look under the old floor, walk you through boards and fitting methods, and send you a written quote. You can see the rest of our flooring work on the Murfreesboro Hardwood Flooring home page.