Jean wrote:

Need your expert advice please if you can.  I have installed acres of 18mm solid wood flooring in all my rooms. this winter with the heating on it seems to be shrinking. Seems to be taking wooden studding with it, i.e., door frames fixed on top of it have moved too. Will this settle down do you think?  Many thanks in advance.

My answer:

This shrinking is due to the wood losing moisture content. The indoor relative humidity is usually quite low in the wintertime. As the air dries out, it draws moisture from the wood floors and the rest of the wood in the house, studs and doors included. When the weather warms, the relative humidity will go back up and the wood’s moisture content will increase. The wood floors, studs, joists, and doors will swell up again. If the wood was excessively moist when installed, it will never return to the original size. If the wood had the proper moisture content when it was installed, it will return to its original size. It’s impossible for me to say without knowing the condition at the time of installation.

Seasonal shrinkage of wood in a home is a normal occurrence. One way to reduce this shrinking is to add humidity to your home. A central humidifier installed on your heating system will work if you have forced air heat. Otherwise, a free-standing humidifier would help. If you install or start using a humidifier, it might take weeks for the wood to absorb enough moisture to make a visible difference in the shrinkage you see.

If your floors do not return to normal and excessive cracking is still a problem next summer, call your contractor and tell him you think he installed a wood floor with too high a moisture content. Hopefully he’ll stand behind his work.

Read more about many home design and building topics at my other site, www.about-home-design.com.

But another rule in laying wood flooring has to do with the aesthetics or look of the flooring. As a general rule, wood flooring looks best when running in the same direction as the longest dimension of the room. For instance, if the room is ten feet by sixteen feet, the wood flooring will look best when running in the sixteen foot direction. The narrower the room, the more important this is. So in a hallway that is only four feet wide, the wood flooring really needs to run the length of the hall and not crosswise, if at all possible. In rooms that are more square in shape, the direction of the wood flooring is not as critical.

Also consider the view you have of the floor when you enter the room. The wood flooring looks best if laid perpendicular to your view direction. This will disquise the cracks between the planks. If you are looking straight down the planks, the seams between the boards will be more obvious. And if the seams are not perfectly straight, you will more readily see that variation, too.

It’s not always practical to run the flooring in these optimal directions. But if you can do it, the benefits are real. If the floor joists below the wood flooring are running the wrong direction for the way you want the flooring to look in the room, ask your builder to install wood blocking beneath the floor from joist to joist to support a floor running parallel to the joists. This will cost a bit more, but it will be worth it in narrow spaces, like hallways.

Of course, selecting the right wood for your floor is very important. Consider the grain and color of the wood and how it will look with other wood items in the room, like kitchen cabinets and wood trim.

One other neat feature is to install flush thresholds between rooms. I show photos of this and describe it in detail in my book, Designing Your Perfect House.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

I have new medium cherry cabinets in a new home that we have just purchased.  I would like them to be much darker.  Is it possible to do this without refinishing the cabinets?  What wood for flooring would you suggest to complement/contrast the darker cherry cabinets?

My answer:

To change the color of cabinets usually means you would need to refinish the cabinets to some degree, depending on their condition. Since yours are new and in good shape, you could clean the surfaces and apply a polyurethane finish with an integral stain over the finish you already have. Minwax Polyshades is one of these products. This would mean that you would not have to strip and sand the existing doors and cabinets. So if that’s what you mean by “refinish,” then the answer is, “No,” you won’t have to refinish new cabinets to change the color. You’ll merely have to add a colored finish on top of the existing finish. Just be sure to follow the directions exactly. Don’t skip any steps. You might try samples of colors on the backs (insides) of the doors before doing any of the fronts. That way you’ll see what you’ll get in an inconspicuous place.

 As far as wood flooring choices go, take a look at the medium to lighter woods, like white oak or even reclaimed heart pine. Don’t go dark with the floor if you are darkening your cabinets. Try for a nice, eye-pleasing contrast between the woods. I’m not sure where you’re located and what is available. But with the smooth cherry cabinets, you could select a flooring that has an “active” and interesting grain pattern, if you like. If oak is too grainy, take a look at rift sawn and quarter sawn oak before rejecting it. Normal, plain-sawn oak can have arch-shaped grain patterns that some folks don’t care for. Rift-sawn and quarter-sawn oak has a beautiful straight grain look and accents of what are called medullary rays, or pith rays. Rift sawn oak is one of my favorites. My mantel and adjoining cabinets in my family room are built of this wood.

 I hope this helps. Good luck with your project.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

We are starting to select the different materials around the house.  Your beautiful pictures have been a great inspiration…  I particularly like your wooden floors on pages 114

Page 114 Photo from "Designing Your Perfect House"

and 194. 

Page 194 Photo from "Designing Your Perfect House"

Do you happen to remember/can you recognize the kind of wood they are made of?

Here’s my answer.

The wood floor on page 114 is Santos Mahogany. You can see another view of that flooring on page 150. It looks a bit different from one photo to another depending on the direction of the light. Santos Mahogany is one of the few woods that actually gets lighter when exposed to light. The wood you see in the photos has been in place since 2002. So it has already lightened.

The wood flooring on page 194 can be seen again on page 226. This wood floor is Jatoba. It is also known as Brazilian Cherry. But keep in mind that what is often sold as Brazilian Cherry is actually an assortment of pieces of three different species. Jatoba is one of them and I do not know what the other two species are. But some of the pieces of the other species can tend to look a bit greenish. So if you want the redder color, specify that all of the wood must be Jatoba without any other species included.

I always welcome questions and comments concerning anything related to house design, homebuilding, and remodeling. if they are questions i think other reader might like to hear, I’ll post them in my blog.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

Gaps between boards, or cracks, if you will, are not the result of the wood floor failing or falling apart. They are the result of the wood planks shrinking as the relative humidity goes down and the wood floor loses moisture content. The air in the summer has a higher relative humidity than in the summer. This lets the wood flooring absorb moisture and swell. So usually gaps between boards go away in the summer. Then those gaps reappear in the winter as the humidity goes down again.

If your builder had installed the floors with too little moisture content at the time of installation, when the relative humitidy went up, the boards would have nowhere to swell or expand and they would push against each other causing the planks to cup and possibly rise. Flooring must be installed to allow this seasonal swelling and shrinking.

If you have standard, 2 1/4″ wide flooring, you should not have gaps wider than the thickness of a business card. However, sometimes two or three boards will stick together and move as a unit. This would produce one crack the width of the thickness of three business cards instead of three cracks, each the with the thickness of one business card. This would be considered normal. If you have cracks wider than that, chances are the floor was installed with too high a moisture content.

If your flooring consists of wider planks, your gaps will be proportionately wider. The wood will shrink the same percentage, but the actual dimension of the crack will necessarily be wider. Planks twice as wide will produce gaps that are twice as wide.

Engineered flooring shrinks less than solid wood flooring. This is because engineered floor has a solid wood surface, but the underlying wood is actually plywood. Plywood is dimensionally more stable because it is assembled with the wood grain of each layer running ninety degrees to the layer above and below. Wood shrinks across the grain and not much with the grain. So one layer reisist the shrinkage of the neighboring layer. If you want wide plank floors, take a hard look at engineered flooring. It will remain much more dimensionally stable than solid wood planks, yet the surface, the part you see and walk upon, will be identical to the solid plank.

Filling the gaps is merely a temporary cure. When the wood swells again as the season changes, chances are the filler will be squeezed out. My recommendation is to look around at older houses and observe the gaps in those floors. It’s likely you looked right past those blemishes and maybe even viewed them as part of the “patina of age” and thought they enhanced the charm of the house. Your house will develop it’s own patina and grow more charming every season if you let the nature of wood take its course. Your wood floors are a natural product that abides by the laws of nature. Swelling and contracting with moisture content is the natural behavior of wood.

I always welcome comments. Please feel free to post a comment and share your experience with the rest of us.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

    Each species will look different depending on how it is cut. Most are available as “plain sawn.” Many are also available as quarter-sawn and rift-sawn. The different cut makes the grain of the wood show differently. Many of these species are considerably harder than red oak and therefore they will last much longer and resist indentations. So explore your options before settling on the good old standard of red oak.

    Wood is a renewable resource. Don’t be worried about the sustainability issue with wood floors if you are buying from a source that only deals with managed plantations or reclaimed wood.  I work with a good company here in North Carolina called Select Forest Products. Here’s what they say about sustainability on their website. Some of these facts may defy the common perception of wood use.

Sustainability
Select Forest Products is committed to new growth, plantation-grown imported woods, and salvaged, reclaimed woods only. We will not sell any rainforest or tropical woods which are not grown exclusively for the purpose of commercial lumbering uses, worldwide. There’s alot of misinformation out there about the actual status of new growth forests, and we’d like to point out a few facts for our customers:

• The United States and Canada grow about twice as much hardwood as they harvest annually.
• Wood is a natural resource, renewable and recyclable.
• Buildings, barns, ships and other structures made of wood often find a second life in wood flooring, cabinets, walls and ceilings.
• In the early 1600s, forests covered about one-half of the area of what is now the continental United States. More than a billion acres of land was forested when the pilgrims arrived. Today, even with all the clearing for development, with all the tree harvesting, with all the wood products we have consumed in 350 years, we still have more than 753 million acres in forests, nearly three-quarters as much as when the first settlers arrived.
• Last year, more than 2.3 billion seedlings were planted in the United States by the forestry community. That’s more than nine new trees for every man, woman and child in America.
• Leading allergists agree that wood floors are the perfect choice for a healthy home.
• Foresters sustain habitats that teem with wildlife, contribute to clean air and water, provide recreational opportunities and supply products that find new life in the home.

Use wood from good sources and sleep with a good conscience.

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If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

    I often discuss this issue with my clients. My feeling is that there needs to be some color distinction between the flooring and the cabinetry so that the cabinets don’t look like the floor is simply wrapping itself up the walls. After all, one is the floor and the other is essentially furniture and they should express themselves differently. I would suggest that there is no rule about which wood is the lighter or the darker.

    But I would also say that you need to consider the grain of both woods. This characteristic of the wood is often overlooked. If your flooring has a busy or strong grain, like oak, hickory, or even an antique pine, a smoother grained wood, like cherry or clear alder would be best for the cabinets. This will keep you from being overwhelmed with too much visual activity in the wood grain. I also think that the flooring is the place for the strong grained wood and not the cabinets.

    In my book, Designing Your Perfect House: Lessons from an Architect, I discuss this very issue. Here’s a photo of a kitchen where I used cumaru teak for the flooring, with a fairly strong grain, and quarter-sawn oak for the cabinetry. Oak is normally a pronounced grain when plain sawn, but when rift or quarter sawn, the grain is smoother and much more refined. The combination worked out very nicely.

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If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.