White Oak Flooring in Murfreesboro, TN

If you want a hard, heavy oak floor with a calm gray-brown tone, white oak is the wood we'd show you first. Murfreesboro Hardwood Flooring lays it as solid boards or as engineered planks, from older homes near the square to newer builds out toward Blackman and Rockvale.

A wood that grows close to Murfreesboro

The Forest Service's Fire Effects Information System says it grows over much of the eastern United States, and Tennessee is on its list of states. The Wood Handbook adds that most white oak lumber is cut in the South, South Atlantic and Central States, the southern Appalachian area among them.

That same Forest Service profile calls white oak wood heavy, hard, strong and durable. It names white oak the most important timber oak and lists flooring as one of its main uses.

How it stacks up against red oak

If you're torn between white and red oak, the Wood Handbook points to a few ways they differ.

In white oak heartwood, the wood from the center of the tree, the pores are usually plugged by growths called tyloses. The handbook says these tend to keep liquids from passing through the wood. The Forest Service adds that white oak is now the main wood used for whiskey barrels.

The handbook also says white oak is somewhat heavier than red oak, and that its heartwood holds up well against decay.

We lay both, so ask us to bring a board of each. Our red oak flooring page goes into red oak.

Color, grade and cut

The handbook describes white oak heartwood as generally grayish brown. The sapwood, the outer band just under the bark, is nearly white and about 1 to 2 inches wide.

Grade is how the face of each board looks. The handbook says oak flooring has four main grades. They are Clear, Select, and two Common grades, numbered 1 and 2. We bring sample boards in the grades you're weighing, so you see the knots and color in your own rooms.

The cut is how the mill slices the log into boards. The handbook names two, plainsawn and quartersawn, and we bring a board of each so you can see how the grain looks on top. The handbook says quartersawn boards shrink and swell less, wear more evenly and are less prone to gaps along their edges. It also says many buyers like the silvery flecks in quartersawn grain.

Humid Tennessee summers and your boards

Wood soaks up water from the air around it. The Forest Products Laboratory calls this hygroscopic, and says the water left in wood tends to settle at a balance with the humidity of the room.

The handbook's advice is to lay wood at the moisture level it will live at once the house is in use, which it says keeps seasonal swelling down and helps avoid problems like buckling. It also suggests checking a few random boards with a moisture meter when they arrive and again before they go down, and opening the bundles so the air reaches every side.

On a Murfreesboro job, that looks like this:

• We stack the opened boxes in the rooms getting the new floor and run the house's own air.
• We take meter readings on the boards and on the floor below until they agree.
• We leave a small gap at each wall, under the trim, so the floor can move.

The EPA suggests keeping indoor humidity under 60 percent, and ideally between 30 and 50 percent.

Older homes, historic streets and the old floor

Murfreesboro has a historic zoning district. The city's historic zoning FAQ lists interior changes of any kind among the work that does not need a Certificate of Appropriateness, or COA, a design sign-off the city uses in that district. We count a new floor as inside work on that list. For outside work on a house in the district, the city says to contact its Planning Department first.

The old floor has to go somewhere once we take it up. The City of Murfreesboro says its crews only empty what is inside your garbage cart and won't take things left at the curb. Rutherford County says building and tear-out debris isn't accepted at its convenience centers and has to go to the county transfer station. We load up the old boards, nails and carpet ourselves and take them away.

Your written quote

We measure first, and then we give you a written price for your house. That price depends on the square footage, how many doorways, closets and corners we cut around, the grade, cut and width you choose, whether we sand and finish on site, and any repair to the subfloor, the wood layer under your floor.

Ask any installer to put these in writing:

• White oak by name, plus solid or engineered, the grade, the cut, the width and the thickness.
• How and when they will check moisture, and how long the boards sit in the house first.
• The stain and finish brand, the color and how many coats.
• Whether furniture moving, tear-out and haul-away are part of the price.

Questions about white oak flooring in Murfreesboro

Get a quote for white oak flooring

Call us or fill in the quote form with your ZIP code and the rooms you have in mind. We'll come out, measure, show you grade and cut samples, and send a written quote. For the rest of our work, visit the Murfreesboro Hardwood Flooring home page.