Flooring Installation

White oak.

For a prewar, or postwar with large rooms, herringbone floors look wonderful

"When new floors are installed, how can you make sure that they are not slippery?"

Install wall-to-wall carpeting.

Herringbone is nice. I saw units in Rushmore with unidirectional flooring. Looked awful and really turned me off.

I can highly recommend the person who did my flooring ( bamboo wood floors) He is very skilled, reasonable and knows his craft. He also does great carpentry, too. Jay Klein 917-771-5382.

chinabelle, thanks for the recommendation. How do you like your bamboo wood floors? Do they wear well? I like the look of bamboo flooring.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Warning---Bamboo-Floor-Problems&id=556457

Read this before considering bamboo

One problem with herringbone floors is that if you get a bad water damage issue, sometimes they don't simply cup, but actually pop out and you have to replace whole sections of flooring which cab be very difficult and expensive (and of course the initial installation is much more expensive). Also, I would satay away from herrigbone in anything other than "public" rooms suck as living room, dining room, library, large foyer, etc.

In addition, before they actually start installing them, make sure you know where they are going to start the pattern and how it will lay out in a room: shifting the pattern 6" right or left sometimes makes a HUGE difference, especially at transition points, corners, etc,. I strongly suggest a somewhat interesting border around the room as well, because I think herringbone terminating directly into a wall can produce some inferior results ( this http://www.coxfinefloors.com/large/p31.jpg vs this http://www.coxfinefloors.com/large/486.jpg - although I think this boarder is skimpy, it's the first one I easily found a pic of). Also I've never seen a herringbone pattern running the short way of a room which looked good.

Personally, I have herringbone white oak 18" with a white oak and double walnut strip border in my living room, but straight strip (everything else the same) in my bedroom.

You might also want to consider basket weave pattern. If you've got a really HUGE room, Versailles Parquet can be amazing.

Another consideration is what size strips: 12", 18", 24"? Too small or too large for the room can look odd, but also having difference sizes in different rooms can look odd.

Thanks 30 yrs and Riversider. Riversider, I appreciate the link to the helpful article. 30 yrs, I had read your comments about herringbone floors in the discussion on "Hardwood Floors" about seven months ago. I hadn't realized the additional factors to take into account if you lay herringbone floors and I appreciate you sharing your expertise. In my rental apartment, our living room air conditioner flooded our floor and it was quite a mess (and the building handled most of the problem, not me). When we moved in here, the floors were very slippery and I didn't know how to make them less slippery so we ended up installing wall to wall carpet which I really hate.

In general, the higher gloss the finish, the more slippery.

i presume you are aware of how ezine articles work? this is a site for people to build traffic for their websites...the absolute last place to rely on for real information.

My LR has a 14" border with a field of 1.5x18" herringbone. Proportions seem good, but maybe I'm just used to it. It's nearly 100 years old, though, and won't take another sanding, so the next owner will have to shell out.

I think that you're right, 30 yrs, about a glossy finish being more slippery. Our crappy rental unit floors were very shiny when we moved in. I kept hoping that the floors would become less slippery, but realized after a few weeks that we had no choice but to install carpet. I found out over time that many of my neighbors made the same decision.

Does anyone have a recommendation for flooring stores to visit? I've been reading as many flooring magazines as I can find, but I'd love to talk to someone in person about the particulars of installing floors or refinishing existing floors. I see those beautiful photos of flooring in magazines, but the floors in most of the apartments I've viewed look pretty bad in comparison.

You know the old floor cleaning commercials which complained about a "waxy build-up"? Well, if your floors are too slippery just wax them to dull the shine (sheen?) and it will also make them less slippery in to process.

Also, sometimes rather than sanding floors and refinishing, people 'screen" their floors to take off the ploy finish and re-poly. If you use a very fine screen for the screening (pretty much a rotary buffing like you always see used to buff up the terrazzo floors in office buildings), you can remove the sheen and also make the floors less slippery. Just be careful not to take off all the poly or you will have to refinish them.

I prefer random width american walnut, oiled not poly, for the classic look, but (a) it needs to be in the right setting, and (b) you need to be willing to re-oil every five years or so.

Lobster -- A good place to look at higher end flooring is LV Wood Floors, on 20th between 5th & 6th. Otherwise, there is always Lumber Liquidators at Union Square.