20 Best Wood For Floors (2022 Updated)

Had this flooring professionally installed in one room. I can’t yet speak to its durability or long term performance, but so far it looks nice. The planks are thin, much thinner than the engineered hardwood flooring I have in other parts of my house.

I finally got my floor that I have been looking for since last year. They match perfectly to what I have through out my home.

I opened the box and got excited!!! BETTER than I imagined! Love the color!

I was nervous about buying 900sf of flooring online though I had ordered several samples whose quality I was impressed by. I’ve had this glued installation for master bedroom, foyer, dining rm living rm, powder rm for about 5 wks now loving the lightness of the warm blonde & gray tones.

The distressed wire brushed texture varies board to board some more, others less with a low satiny sheen. It feels awesome under bare feet. Overall very pleased with the floor!.

I’d use them again! Got great quality hardwood for the best price on the market! Was nervous to buy it online but they right away sent 4 more samples to see the consistency which helped make our decision.

They also accepted our extra boxes with a full return minus shipping. We are super satisfied and happy with their customer service! We’d use them again for sure and already have recommended BuildDirect to friends and family.

Service and support was absolutely amazing, followed up all the way through. Better than local flooring places. Floor is beautiful and installers did very well with it. It is red oak under the light finish and if scratched (it did), it does show red.

We installed our floors in Nov/Dec 2018 and still love them. (Writing this in Sept 2021. ) The color is gorgeous. When first installed, they had a kind of waxy coating that looked smudged as soon as anyone walked on them with bare feet.

Over the course of 4-5 months of regular use and cleaning, that went away. For cleaning we have only ever used a damp cloth. (We use a “Sh-Mop” which is a flat head with a cotton terry cloth cover. It works great.

) The wax was also an signification factor/issue in installation. About half of the planks required manually scraping extra wax out of the grooves so that they would snap together properly. The floors do chip/dent/scratch and we have quite a few places–mainly in the kitchen, but they are not really noticeable.

I noticed the review opportunity when looking for ideas to repair some chips. We are generally careful to clean up spills promptly but there are always little splashes in a heavily used kitchen, but with the exception of one chipped spot, we have seen no evidence of water damage even around the sink or fridge which get the most wet.

One of our larger chips is near the dishwasher and that one has been impacted. We should have tried to repair it sooner, as it has gotten worse. I’ve included a photo of it as the moisture has caused the surface to start to lift.

Other chips in the house do not have this issue. Our main word of warning is for people installing over radiant heat. We have a concrete slab with radiant heat. We brought the newly purchased flooring inside, opened the packing and let it acclimate for recommended time (it was Nov and we are in the Pacific Northwest, so our heated floors were ON.

) The floors were installed with the recommended gap from the wall to allow for expansion/contraction. Over the next several years, what we have found is that the floors continually SHRINK. They contracted and shrunk A LOT.

We have had to remove baseboards and add flooring in MANY MANY MANY places throughout the house. Even some of the places where we added wood have shrunk more. We are not sure if it’s the radiant floors as they do not expand in the summer when the concrete underneath is much cooler.

It may be they are just continually more dried out than in a normal house. However, if we were doing it again, we would install with a very very small expansion gap at the edges. The noticable shrinkage has continued over YEARS so just letting them acclimate a couple of weeks longer than recommended would not have done the trick.

I bought five cartons of Fossilized Mocha Bamboo Engineered wide click flooring from Lowe’s. I just got done laying it and it is quite beautiful. Be aware that if you buy the flooring from Lowe’s you can expect zero help from Cali Bamboo.

I got ghosted on email queries to customer support. No one returned telephone messages that I left. There were very long waits for online chats and they almost always ended abruptly once I made it know that I purchased my flooring at Lowe’s.

A beautiful floor, but very disappointing customer service and support.

Ty at Cali Bamboo was a great help in selecting the proper floor and getting it delivered when I wanted it. Pricing was comparable to the big box stores with the added bonus of being able to talk to someone who knows their product and can provide a wealth of information and assistance as you order your floor.

I ordered an engineered bamboo floor. It came shrink wrapped and in excellent condition. Ty provided details on taking care of any shipping damage, fortunately there was none. The floor itself is an excellent product.

It went down easily and looks fantastic. This is the fifth click together floor I have put down, the other 4 were laminates. I’d tell anyone to consider this if you are looking at laminates. It is much better engineered and looks real because it is real wood.

Excellent product I’m sure anyone would appreciate.

This flooring is just FANTASTIC. I put the Baylis high density underlayment down as a vapor barrier/sound/cushion and it went great. Used a double glue down installation for thresholds and boards near wall and a 1 1/2″ 15.

5 gauge staple elsewhere with a Bostich pneumatic stapler. The BuilDirect team send me a total of (4) separate additional orders on time to complete this job. I ended up buying 30 boxes and used 29. 5 for 950 sq ft.

My buddy who does hardwood floors for a living LOVED the product. I called several times to double check underlayment, glue type, staple size, etc. EVERY person I spoke with was knowledgeable, answered my questions, and set my mind at ease.

They got a customer for life with their service.

Yes, not quite so dark and lots of variability in the pieces which I liked. Install went well in two bedrooms. Very good quality, no complaints of board not fitting together well, picked because it was close in color to the solid acacia we wanted for another bedroom, not disappointed.

It shows the true character of this wood type.

The flooring is beautiful. My installers said it went together well and was a “top notch” product. I expected some waste or bad pieces and didn’t have any waste. In fact I have 2 extra boxes, this is an excellent product.

We bought this product because it is supposed to be a strong floor. It scratches VERY easily. Not just small scratches, deep and non-repairable scratches. I am very careful and put felt under all legs of furniture.

This is the worst flooring I have every purchased. I also only use Bona products like they suggested. The cleaner makes the floor look very dull unless you use the high gloss formula on the floor. Then you had better be very careful when you walk due to the slip factor.

I like the flooring but had to order tongue and groove because the click and snap was no longer available. The sales person assured me that by simply cutting a bit off the tongue and groove I could add it to the snap which I had for most of the room, i had to purchase more flooring to finish up the project.

The flooring was a different thickness and while I was able to make do, I was not completely pleased with the results. I found the click and snap much easier to install. I also was surprised at how expensive the flooring was when I ordered it directly.

Hopefully it’s stability and hardiness will warrant the cost.

I put in about 900 SF of “Natural” toned wide T&G 4 months ago in a traditional naildown installation. So far we’ve been extremely happy with the floor. great price compared to alternatives, and the durability seems top notch, as advertised.

We have two medium sized (60 lb) dogs and an active 2-1/2 year old running around constantly, and the floor has completely shed damage so far. The light color has really brightened up the house compared to the darker varnished fir that we replaced.

The boards we got were extremely consistent in color and quality, with very little wastage necessary. I read through almost all the reviews on this website before purchasing, wanting to look at the worst complaints that people had and get a sense if this flooring was all it claimed to be.

I noticed there’s a contingent of customers who have been dissatisfied by their flooring and the follow on customer service, and I looked into that a lot too. I can definitely sympathize with their experiences, especially since most homeowners can’t realistically be technically savvy enough to understand the differences between products, installation methods, and craftsmanlike quality.

Most folks are trusting that a flooring installer will give them the right advice and do a quality job with the right details; this may or may not be true. Caveat emptor. check your installer’s references, ask folks who have had a floor for a year or two.

A quality flooring install starts with a solid and level (or at least flat) subfloor; without this, the best flooring in the world will end up a squeaky mess within short order. My old 1915 house had a lot of sagging going on in various areas (about 3/4″ within a span of 6 ft), and I had 4 different installers quote ways to repair these spots.

The subfloor was the original diagonal shiplap, and was only marginally stiff due to 2 x 6″ joists (standard at the time). Long story short, I was not impressed with the proposals from any of the installers.

Most could care less what they installed the new flooring over or how flat it was; in my kitchen I had 4 layers of flooring over the subfloor (fir, two different linoleum tiles, and a floating Pergo floor on top) and every single contractor said they’d recommend pulling the Pergo but leaving everything else and installing over it – essentially sealing in the squeaky old stuff and barely providing any proper tooth for the cleats to hold the flooring to the subfloor.

None cared about the flatness of the floor, and when I raised the issue everyone uniformly proposed self leveling compound (an easy but somewhat hack fix in this situation). In the end I chose to demo all existing flooring myself, then glue and screw 3/4″ underlay ply over my original subfloor, fixing the floor dips by shimming with 1/8″ luan.

The results were spectacular. with the finish flooring nailed down the deck is incredibly stiff. night and day from the original installation. I have yet to hear my first squeak and hope to never hear one! Spend the time / money to prepare a proper subfloor and you’ll have a result that you’re happy with.

The other thing I’d caution is that I see that most dissatisfied customers seem to have used a click type floating installation, sometimes DIY and sometimes professionally installed. This product definitely has its place to do a quick / easy installation, save some $$$, etc.

but it’s obvious weakness is in migration due to moisture fluctuation. People almost universally site cupping boards or separating boards due to seasonal moisture changes – and YES, this happens. It is not a flaw in the product, it is a flaw in the installation.

The installation guidelines are very clear about the need to provide for adequate room for expansion/contraction, and to use breaks covered by transition molding across very large width spaces. This is not magic; you can calculate the amount of expansion/contraction your floor will see using methods such as this: http://www.

crescenthardwood. com/nofma/bof. pdf. Bamboo floors are no more or less susceptible to this change than any other flooring, in fact less so that many solid wood flooring materials. But in a traditional nail down floor, the 1 or 2″ that a floor might expand across the 24′ width of my house is shared between 50 to 100 gaps between planks, and the nails keep the whole flooring system anchored in place.

1″ expansion over 50 gaps would be 0. 020″ between each plank – only noticable if you’re looking carefully. Alternatively in a floating click lock floor, the planks tend to be held tightly to one another without gaps by the interlock, meaning that the floor builds up tension or compression and wants to move the outside borders of the whole installation by the 1″ expansion amount.

Over several cycles of this the floor walks around on the underlay, with the resulting built up stresses eventually separating the planks in areas. This means that a durable click lock installation must plan for this expansion and provide strategic breaks in the flooring and adequate clearance to hard stops.

It’s all in the instructions, you just have to read and understand them. If you ask me though, put in T&G for a long lasting, quality job.

Let me start of by saying these floors look absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, if you so much as stare too long at this floor it will ding and scratch. This wood is very soft and will dent if you drop anything on it (even from a foot off the ground).

If you have pets do not get this floor. We’ve had to purchase large rugs in every room to cover up these great looking floors.

This teak flooring is amazing! Love that it is 5″ wide. When installed, your eye does not notice the “seems” of the flooring and instead focuses on the visual texture in the color variations. We Love the color variations! We picked it up from a local warehouse, utilizing the cost saving shipping method BuildDirect offers.

This may have been our only issue thus far. We were scheduled to pick this item up on a day of cold pouring rain in WI. The pallets were nicely wrapped in plastic, but we did have to break one pallet down to fit our trailer and the guys at the local warehouse were very helpful and loaded the pallets as best they could on our trailer, with their forklifts.

(I should mention the shipper BuildDirect would have provided would not make the delivery on our road, as it is a narrow road with no turn around available for them. Which we understood, as we have lived in our residence for more than 10 years so it wasn’t really a surprise to us.

) We just completed the install of 2 rooms in our home. There is next to no waste, and we had 6 doorways to contend with for our first attempt at flooring. We have not had one piece “damaged” that we have had to place in a scrap pile to use as a salvage piece.

We have utilized EVERY single piece in our shipment so far. We believe this HARD hardwood flooring was worth every penny, and probably should have cost WAY more had we purchased it from a local flooring center.

We liked that it was pre-finished and were able to move the furniture back into our rooms upon completion. We would buy this product again, but we bought enough to complete our ENTIRE house with this purchase.

We saved thousands of dollars!.

This flooring has completely transformed my home! My customer service rep Mila Quinn was awesome. The samples I received sealed my choice for this selection. This was a 1 day installation for my entire first floor.

Thanks so much once again I’ll definitely purchase again for the stairs and upstairs hallway.

I bought this to replace water-damaged hardwood floor. My expectation wasn’t high, I just wanted to fix the floor as cheaply and quickly as possible. Turned out, this product is genuinely great. Installation is easy (make sure to do the proper prep work), quality of material is quite good, too.

I was surprised by how much I liked it, even over the original floor. I should also mention that it’s proven to be quite durable, too, which was another surprise. Overall, I’m very impressed, it’s a very rare thing nowadays – cheep and cheerful.

If you install floors professionally, installing this wood would be no problem. My husband and I decided to glue this floor down (recommended by a contractor). It is extremely time-consuming and very messy.

If you get any glue on the floor, it is next to impossible to remove. If you are patient and very strong, consider this flooring. If you’re not, go with a floating floor! The floor does look beautiful, though.

We had this flooring installed not too long ago. We love the color and the destressed look of the floor. I know that some people do not like to see knots or destressing, it looks like real wood not like laminate, but we love it and we love the wide plank.

Looking forward to enjoying the floor for many years.

There was a much greater variation on the product than any pictures I saw of this product (only reason I didn’t give 5 stars) The sample I received looked very much like all of the images on Cali’s website but the actual product was quite different.

At first I was quite disappointed over this but I have to say the look has grown on me and we have received numerous compliments from our guests on the look of the new floor. As far as quality of the planks: we chose CALI after taking quite a few samples from many different vendors and attempting to scratch/damage them.

– We have 5 children and 3 giant-breed dogs in our house so durability was the largest factor for us. I have to say that CALI simply outperformed all other samples by a wide margin. Furthermore, CALI’s milling of the boards seems to be quite good.

Out of 50 boxes of product there were only perhaps 5 or 6 planks that had to be discarded. Plank width was fairly consistent with a few with widths 1/16″ or less difference from the 5 & 1/8 design. My wife and I have installed a few different wood floors in our last 2 houses and I think we will be staying with CALI for our next project.

Putting this in my entire downstairs. Frustrating because there are differences end to end with the widths of the board- up to 1/16″ sometimes. It makes it so that you have to test and try to fit all the ends one by one to find a match before you can put anything in.

If one end is narrower then your next piece it’s not going to fit cleanly and there will be gaps. I have gaps. I figured this out the hard way. It is something I can hide but still it’s not something I should have to fight with.

Still going to install the floor as it looks acceptable and the end result looks good minus the minor things. I think these sentiments could be only for the eucalyptus. My mother in law did a bamboo product from Cali (installed it themselves) and it looks very good and clean.

The ends look all similar size and there are no gaps; and maybe that’s because the mills are able to fabricate the bamboo to better tolerances. If that’s not the case then the folks over there making the eucalyptus boards need a tune up with quality control.

I’m a tradesman, this stuff isn’t rocket science; but I was under the understanding this is a high end product- and boards are supposed to be much more within tolerances (same) from board to board- and that is a trait of high end products.

My experience is not the case with this material. Furthermore (and this is just the nature of eucalyptus so I’m not so upset) the boards in my situation do tend to warp; both width wise and length wise.

So again, you have to pay attention to what you put in or else you will end up with something you might trip on if you install a board that is concave next to a board that is convex- no joke! I acclimate my boards so lack of acclimation could not be a variable.

This is a floating floor with the Pergo Gold underlayment. Project is going well and we will have a good product when finished; and I’m sure the imperfections will be something that most people would never see.

My wife is happy and therefore I am happy.

I absolutely LOVE these floors in all respect! Having said that, my click floors were professionally installed in January 2019 over concrete that had been leveled & prepped with Cali underlayment. In the rectangular spaces, all is well.

The problem is a long hallway that is a very elongated “Z” shape, so those board edges are cut at other than a 90 degree angle & cannot expand & contract the same as rectangularly-cut boards. These boards are “stuck” by the shape of the walls.

If the interior humidity was always about 35 degrees there would not be an issue, but in the summer when humidity is about 50 degrees, the diagonally-cut boards cannot expand, so they buckle. In the winter with about 20 degree humidity, the same boards contract & spaces open up between boards.

During spring & fall, the floors return to perfect. My solution will be to have my HVAC system retrofitted with both a dehumidifier & a humidifier. Costly, but should solve the problem.

OMG. Bought the solid mocha stranded stuff. This stuff is the bomb! So, I hired a contractor to install it as my bathroom counter. Told them I didn’t want nails showing, so of course, they put a ton of nails.

Tried to poke them in and patch. Couldn’t get stain to match right, so decided to sand and refinish. Sanded for THREE SOLID DAYS with everything down to 80 grit. Didn’t do squat to it, until I got down to 80 grit, which barely made a dent.

Roommate also sanded in shifts with me. Neither one of us ever wants to sand anything again, and I think we’re traumatized. Gave up and ripped it out and redid it. So yeah, THIS stuff could probably survive the apocalypse, its so hard! I want to replace all my garbage pergo that curls up if you sneeze on it with it.

It’s beautiful, and absolutely, LITERALLY as tough as nails.