When sanding conventional solid wood flooring, you need to be aware of the direction of the grain of the wood.  But because parquet wood flooring has wood grain going in all sorts of different directions, the concept of sanding with or against the grain of the wood goes out the window.

Remember, that is how parquet is constructed; that’s the very point of parquet, in fact. It’s a crazy quilt of little pieces of wood set in different directions.

So, to avoid the problem of extensive cross-grain scratching you need to follow a prescribed sanding procedure:

Step 1 – Sand at 15 Degree Angle

Begin at the wall, moving the sander in a 15° direction towards the center of the room.  Stop at sanding when you get to the center.

Step 2 – Sand at Opposite 15 Degree Angle

Do the same thing on the opposite wall but be sure to stagger your sanding passes.  Next, begin from the side as you did before, except flip-flop the 15° angle of your sanding direction and keep going towards the center of the room.

Step 3 – Sand Perpendicular to Walls

Finally, stand towards the center of the room from the walls, but sanding at a 90° direction from the wall.

Parquet Sanding Tips

Finally, you’re going to want to avoid using extensively abrasive grits with your sandpaper and drum sanders.  They coarsest grits you should have would be in the 50 to 80 grit range, following up with grits in the 80 to 100 range.  Remember, the higher the number, the finer the grits.

Types of Wood Parquet Tile Flooring

There are two types of wood parquet tile flooring.  The first type is solid wood, in which, as the name implies, the wood runs all the way from top to bottom.  The other kind is a laminated wood parquet tile flooring, much like engineered flooring.  This type has a stable plywood base upon which a finish veneer has been placed.  Whether solid wood or engineered wood, both are available as unfinished or pre-finished products.

Still, it is a misnomer to call solid hardwood parquet truly solid.  The reason for this is that parquet is composed of small pieces of wood and they must be combined together one way or another.  So even this solid hardwood parquet does have a poly mesh or paper layer on the back.  The reason manufacturers use a mesh is so that the tile will adhere to the adhesive better, much like the mesh on the back of mosaic tile.

Wood parquet tile is still an unusual flooring choice, so be careful if you expect to be selling the house anytime soon.

Newer types of wood parquet tile flooring have an attached underlayment of foam cushion, eliminating the need for you or the installer to put down separate underlayment.  Not only does this underlayment act as a cushion, it is also self adhesive.  Pull off the protecting paper, press down, and the parquet tile is stuck in place.

Of course, laminated wood flooring being what it is, there is also a parquet version of this, too.  Since laminate is not wood, it really doesn’t even enter into this discussion about wood parquet tile.

Parquet Tile’s Tongue and Groove

One obvious advantage of parquet tile over something like vinyl or linoleum or other types of resilient tiling is that it comes with a tongue and groove system.  All four edges of parquet  tiles have either a tongue or groove, allowing them to be fit into place to the adjoining tile.  This gives your new flooring greater stability.  Otherwise, the floor would move around too much with foot traffic, adhesive or not.

Wood Parquet Tile Sizes

You can find parquet tiles in two typical sizes: 6″ x 6″ or 12″ x 12″.  The 12 inch square parquet tile tends to be the most popular.  Parquet tile comes rather thin, ranging from 5/16 of an inch to as much as three quarters of an inch, though this thicker size is rare.

Parquet Tile Design

Flooring designers recommend that you go easy with parquet tiling because it does tend to have a rather “busy” look about it.  Using a solid decorative inlay border either along the perimeter of the floor or closer in towards the center of the floor is one way to cut this “busy” appearance.  Parquet tiling may be appropriate for a room or two, but rarely do you find parquet installed throughout an entire house.

This stuff mystified me the first time I saw it installed.  I thought:  Isn’t there anything better to lay down as a moisture barrier?  Well, for one thing, you don’t want an absolutely impermeable moisture block–otherwise, you could just lay down sheet plastic, right?

If you don’t want to read the rest of this article, the upshot is this:  red rosin paper is a perfectly acceptable type of protective layer to use for installing wood floors.  But for some details, read on:

Is Red Rosin Paper Waterproof?

No, and it doesn’t pretend to be waterproof.

Red rosin paper has certain “breathability” attributes that you need for wood flooring, because wood flooring needs to breathe, too.  If you’re worried that red rosin paper is just plain old paper, it’s not.  Rosin, after all, is derived from resin, the pitch that comes from pine trees and has long been used as a waterproofing material.

What About Builder’s Felt?

Still, why use it?  Even some professional floor installers question whether red rosin paper is the best protective surface to us, many preferring instead to use good old 15 lb. builder’s felt.  Since floor installers bear the costs of the protective layer, it’s in their best interest to use something that is cost-effective, and red rosin paper certainly is.  The 15 lb. builder’s felt isn’t much more expensive, though installers say that it’s not much more of a moisture barrier than the red rosin.

The consensus is that whether red rosin paper or builder’s felt, the purpose is to slow the passage of moisture.  After all, you’re peppering the subfloor with about 9 million nails, how can you truly make it waterproof anyway?

Wood Flooring Moisture Does Matter

Like the saying goes, “It’s a living, breathing thing,” this wood flooring is.  Though its life in the forest is long over, its new “life” in your house has begun:  wood floor is porous and is subject to expansion and contraction.

Install wood flooring before it has acclimated, and your new floor may end up with severe gaps or buckling, and there ain’t much you can do about it then–other than pulling it out and doing it again.

How Long to Wait?

Guidelines vary according to the wood species and type of flooring.  I say that no time is too long.  Five days is about the bare minimum; seven days even better.

How to Let Wood Flooring Acclimate

Don’t just toss the bundles in the house and let them be.  You need to unpack your bundles and lay the floorboards out flat.  Got pre-finished flooring?  Then lay down a blanket, turn the first layer of boards upside-down (so that the bottom, porous side is most exposed); and stack succeeding layers cross-fashion.  Keep room between the boards (think of it as building a fire–let the oxygen flow!).

Option:  Moisture Meter

If you’re a DIYer and feeling serious about this stuff, you can get a moisture meter.  You stab the meter’s pins into the back side of the floorboard at several places, and get an instant digital readout.  How you’ll know if the wood flooring moisture has stabilized is to keep checking day after day.  When the readings are fairly consistent over the course of three or four days, the flooring is ready to install.

Wood moisture meters can be had for as little as $25.

A:  Overwood refers to the difference in thickness between two adjoining butted pieces of wood floorboards.  Now, keep in mind that we’re not talking about huge differences in thickness; just a few millimeters.  But still enough to make for a less-than-perfect floor installation.

Why butted joints only?  Because side-to-side, tongue-and-groove pieces probably won’t be able to fit together.  Only butted pieces (i.e., non tongue and groove) can adjoin this way.

Let’s put it this way–it’s overwood if it doesn’t reach out and slap you in the face.  It’s something you have to look carefully for.  That’s why it’s even worth marking it out with blue painter’s tape so that you can later correct the overwood “issue.”

So, how do you correct overwood?

Easy if you’ve got unfinished wood flooring.  Run the sander over the higher floorboards–very lightly–and remain clear of the lower pieces.  Then seal as usual.

With pre-finished wood flooring, you’re obviously not going to be sanding the surface.  You need to think ahead, and plane down or sand down the bottom of pre-finished overwood pieces.

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.

Does Your Concrete Slab Have a Vapor Barrier?

Moisture is a problem with any kind of concrete slab.  While concrete may seem impermeable and fortress-like, moisture does wick upward and can ruin your flooring.  If poured correctly, you will have a vapor barrier above the sand/gravel bed and below the concrete slab, like so:

Install Buffer System

A better bet than solid hardwood is engineered wood flooring.  This has better dimensional stability in case of moisture problems.

If your slab has a vapor barrier, then bond down 1″x2″ buffers (sleepers or whatever you like to call them) directly on the concrete.

Make sure that your concrete is absolutely dry before trying to bond the buffer boards down.

These buffer/sleepers essentially are another system of “joists” for your underlayment to rest on.  Since you’ve got concrete slab–and not a wooden raised foundation–these become your “joists.”  Install the sleepers in a network so that they are no more than 12 inches apart.  Make sure that they rest perpendicular to your intended finish flooring direction.

Extra Moisture Protection

Whether or not your slab has a vapor barrier, it’s a good idea to give yourself a vapor barrier of 6-mil or greater poly plastic.  You can lay this vapor barrier over the sleepers, installing the underlayment on top.  Or you can install the vapor barrier below the sleepers, bonding it directly to the concrete.

Random Bundles or Average Length Bundles

We’re talking about solid wood or engineered wood in both cases here.  When you buy something called a random bundle, we’re referring to the length of the boards not the quality (though that may accidentally be the case, too).  With random bundles, the length may range from 8 or 9 inches…all the way up to 8 feet long.  Predictably, the lengths are more on the lower end of the range.

Nested Bundles

Nested bundles of wood flooring still have random lengths of floorboards, but they do not differ so wildly as the previous category.  Lengths here fofrom about six to eight feet.

Specified-Length Bundles

This is a rare category.  It’s just the way it sounds:  every floorboard is the same, exact length (a couple of feet or shorter).  You probably won’t need specified-length bundles, unless you’re putting together some kind of patterned floor.

A: Yes, if your budget allows for it. Quarter-sawn wood flooring is considered a big deal (vs. plain-sawn wood).

Quarter-sawn wood flooring is superior to plain-sawn because of the way the saw bites into the wood.  Instead of sawing tangentially to the rings in the wood, the saw blade approaches perpendicular to the wood rings.

This is a big deal, because sawing tangentially to the rings gives your wood flooring planks more of the really soft wood that the tree produces between the rings.  And the tree rings are the hard part.

Sawing off quarter sections produces less usable planks, so the price is higher.

In this image, the plain-sawn boards are on the right-hand side.

Quarter Sawn Boards

Solid hardwood is just that–solid from top to bottom. Engineered wood is a thin layer (a veneer) of hardwood laid atop a sandwich of other, lesser types of woods. So, when comparing solid hardwood to engineered, we’re just talking about engineered wood’s very top layer.

One interesting thing to note:  some hardwoods are “softer” than softwoods, and the other way around.  So “hard” and “soft” are very general terms.

Wood Flooring – Softwoods

And that brings us to softwoods.  Conversely, softwoods are cheaper, softer and more prone to scratching.

• Pine
• Spruce
• Redwood

Softwoods come from coniferous trees (that is, trees that have cones).  Unfinished softwood flooring is almost impossible to maintain.  But with the application of a good polyurethene coating, it can be harder and easier to maintain (though never approaching the hardness of a true hardwood).

Wood Flooring – Hardwoods

Red Oak Flooring - One of the Most Popular Types of Hardwood Flooring Around

Species is the first term you encounter. Don’t worry about the botanical names such as Quercus rubra, Quercus alba, Juglans nigra, and so on. Those are just the Latin for these terms you have certainly heard of before:

• Red Oak
• White Oak
• Black Walnut

Other types of hardwood (and yes, these are hard woods, contrasted with something we’ll discuss in just a minute, which are the softwoods), include:

• Hickory
• Yellow Birch
• Ash
• Maple
• Teak

The reason people choose hardwoods, even though they are more expensive, is because they are harder (obviously), more dense, and more scratch-resistant.