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HARDWOOD FLOOR INSTALLATION

You’ll be happy to know that we’re fully equipped and skilled to do any hardwood floor installation our Fargo and Moorhead clients need. We have years and years of wood flooring installation experience and have installed hundreds of floors with excellent results.

Installing hardwood floor
An oak hardwood floor installation in Fargo

At Natural Accent Hardwood Floors, we promise that it is worth your money and time to hire a professional company to install hardwood floors in your Fargo home versus hiring a local handyman. However, instead of taking our word for it, we decided to show you precisely what makes our hardwood flooring installs stand out from the rest and, even more importantly, last for generations.

Below are 6 things that define a professional hardwood floor installation...


Quality Flooring

A great hardwood floor starts with a great product. There are no cheap, imported big box store flooring products installed here. At Natural Accent Hardwood Floors, we use only the best unfinished flooring from WD Flooring, Aacer Flooring, Robinson Lumber Company, Cumberland, and other high-quality suppliers. We know that these companies deliver an exceptional product that was dried and milled with care so the wood will not end-check; it will conform to national hardwood grading definitions and have a tight tongue and groove for minimal play and over-wood.

Trimming a floor board
Gluing down a header transition
Cutting wood flooring
Nailing down a brand new hardwood floor
We install floors by either the glue down or nailed method. It depends on the type of sub-floor you have and the style of flooring you choose.

Acclimation

The three most important aspects of starting an installation are acclimation, acclimation, and acclimation! We can’t stress this enough. Acclimating is the process of your hardwood flooring obtaining moisture equilibrium in your home. In other words, since wood swells and shrinks as it takes on and loses moisture, you want your hardwood flooring to have the correct moisture content for your home. The only correct way to achieve this is to bring the wood onto the site (ie. in the home) when, and only when, the home is heated or cooled under normal living conditions.

Flooring stacked and acclimating

Depending on the species, this can take form 4-5 days to 2-3 weeks This means the flooring should not be acclimated, for example, during the drywall and painting process when humidity can be around 80%. Typically, homes in the Fargo and Moorhead will be around 40-55% humidity depending on the time of year.

What happens if you don’t acclimate the wood before installing it? You will have gapping or cupping in your newly purchased hardwood floors in a few weeks to a few months. If the company you used to install the floors didn’t find acclimating the wood necessary, will they be willing to fix the problem???


Header Transitions

A header transition is a board that runs between the door jambs and transitions to other floor coverings. Although these transitions take longer to install than just butting the flooring up to the next floor covering, they are a mark of quality.

Header transitions

They also allow us to taper down or ramp up to floor coverings that don’t have the same height as the hardwood flooring. This way, you don’t need a separate transition molding since the header seamlessly transitions to the adjacent floor covering.


Flush Frame Vents

Flush frame vents are wood vent coverings that fit over heat vents and are installed, sanded, and finished with the floor.

Flush Frame Vent

Typically, they have a frame installed into the floor and an insert that can be removed to clean the vent. Since they sit flush with the wood floor, they add a nice feature to your hardwood flooring without being an eyesore.


Stair Nosing (Landing Tread)

A stair nosing, or landing tread, is used to transition hardwood flooring to a set of steps or a step-down in the floor. As with the header board, installing landing treads that are perfectly scribed, cut, and fit seamlessly between the two walls leading down the steps takes time and skill. It is much faster to butt the flooring up to the area of the steps, but it doesn't look as nice.

Stair nosing and landing tread

At Natural Accent Hardwood Floors, we use stair nosing on all transitions to steps or step-downs, whether a 36″ transition or a 20′ transition.


Groove, Glue and Spline

Almost all quality hardwood flooring comes tongue and grooved. This way, the installer can blind nail into the tongue, and the next board’s groove can slip onto the fastened tongue. A simple concept that yields a well-fastened floor without having to see the thousands of fasteners used to hold down your floor.

But what happens when a custom transition needs to be fabricated, such as a header board or stair nosing? Or what happens when a flush vent needs to be cut into the middle of a board?

The proper way to deal with these situations is by using a grooving bit on a router and route a custom groove on the two joining pieces of flooring. Then use spline (or slip tongue) to connect the two grooves. The spline should be glued into at least one of the flooring pieces. Pretty simple once you think about it.

Routering tongue and groove

At Natural Accent Hardwood Floors, no two wood flooring pieces get joined without tongue and groove. Have you ever noticed a hardwood floor where there is excessive board movement at floor transitions? The floor is literally coming apart at the seams. This is due to the flooring never being glued and splined.

Yes, this process adds time to the project, but it also adds decades to the life of your floor. A properly grooved, glued, and splined transition will make your floor last much, much longer. Think about how much weight is on top of a stair nosing overhanging the floor by a 1 1/4″. Think how often the stair nosing is walked over. Without a proper groove, glue, and spline job, the nosing will start to move after being walked over just a few times. We’ll do it right to make sure it doesn’t.

Sub-floor adhesive

We also use industrial-strength sub-floor adhesive under all our transition boards. This way, years down the road, our header boards, stair nosing, and flush vents still don’t have movement in them, and your floors last much longer!

As you can see, there’s quite a lot involved in a professional hardwood floor installation. Essential details like properly acclimation of the new flooring, sub-floor preparation, properly installed transitions, landings, vents, and correct install procedures must be considered if you want a professional result with your Fargo hardwood floor installation. When we come over to quote on your floors, we will take the time to go over all these details with you.

PHOTOS from past projects

CUSTOMER feedback

We are delighted with the new hardwood floor installed on our main level and upstairs corridor. From quote to final coat, Jim and Ben consistently demonstrated professionalism, deep knowledge, impressive craftsmanship, and close attention to detail. Jim clearly explained every step of the process and kept us informed throughout the project. When carpet excavation revealed a substandard subfloor, he did not charge us to remove the old particle board. Despite the extra work, they still completed the job on schedule and transformed the quality of our living space much for the better. We highly recommend Natural Accent Hardwood Floors. Alan Denton | Fargo, ND
5.0
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