The Types of Floorboards

• Floorboards can be made form wood or constituted elements depending on your preference for durability, appearance and strength. garden image by fumie from Fotolia.com

  Floorboards are laid down on the bottom or a house or building instead of other flooring alternatives like carpeting and tiling. You can use floorboards indoors, in rooms like the kitchen, living room or dining room, and outdoors for decks, balconies and patios. Floorboard installation usually happens before you fix skirtings so that you can hide uneven cut ends. You will need to nail or screw floorboards in place.

Types of Wood

• Floorboards come in either hardwood or softwood. Softwood and hardwood describes the type of wood the manufacturers use to make floorboards. Softwood floorboards are made from conifers and are usually created from pine woods like Radiata Pine, Kauri Pine or Baltic Pine. Manufacturers also make them from Fir, Larch and Redwood. Hardwoods are more expensive than softwoods because they occur naturally and randomly and are more complicated to collect. Woods like Mountain Ash, Beech, Ash, Oak, Birch, Elm, Walnut Red Kauri and Jarrah go into making hardwood floorboards.

Types of Floorboards

• Floorboards can be either square edged or tongue and grooved. Squared edged floorboards are not commonly used in current construction. You usually find them in buildings built before the 1850's. Tongued and grooved floorboards eliminate flooring gaps. To ascertain which type of floorboards you may have, choose two floorboards with a small gap between them and slide a knife blade through as far as possible. If the knife punctures around 10 to 12 mm inwards, the floorboards are tongued and grooved. They are square edge boards if the knife can pass straight through.

Particleboard and Plywood

• Particleboards and plywood are other types of floorboards you can use for home flooring. Particleboard is a reconstituted wood product made of waste-wood products mixed with sawdust and adhesives. It does not bow or warp like plywood, but it can become unstable and swell when it has been exposed to water. You can laminate or veneer particleboard for a shined, smooth finish. Plywoods are generally stronger than particleboards and are kilo-for-kilo stronger than steel. Plywood is made up of lots of thin sheets of wood veneer called plies of veneer. Plywood is also the first type of engineered wood to be invented. It is not only strong but lightweight, versatile and decorative.