More options make for tougher decisions, as anyone who has helped a homeowner with product selection knows. That makes choosing flooring especially difficult. Pattern and color aside, the material choices include bamboo, carpeting, ceramic tile, concrete, cork, laminate, linoleum, rubber, stone, vinyl and wood.

Here’s an overview of the characteristics and benefits of solid wood floors, the most commonly used wood types and the best applications for home building.

Most complaints concerning hardwood flooring are related to changes in the moisture content of flooring and surrounding wood products. View information on some causes of shrinking and swelling of wood flooring, and some of the possible results.

The days of having to wax and scrub your hardwood floors are pretty much gone forever. Manufacturers of prefinished wood floors have developed sophisticated techniques to quickly apply hard, durable, urethane based finishes right at the factory. By using ultra violet lights the prefinished wood planks can have several coats of urethane applied within a matter of a few minutes. This is helping make hardwood floors both more affordable, and much easier to maintain.

Bamboo, long known by the Chinese as the plant of a thousand uses, was once viewed here primarily as panda fuel, fishing poles or Pier 1 patio kitsch. Now it's the trendy raw material of the moment in everything from textiles to flooring.

After you redo an old wood floor or install a new one, the exposed grain has to be protected. There are two basic choices: penetrating sealers and surface sealers. Both require careful prep work and application.

Bamboo flooring is rapidly being accepted by homeowners as an alternative to hardwood flooring. Some of it looks surprisingly similar to hardwood flooring, so you may have already walked on it in homes and not known it.

Sustainable harvests have also gone mainstream. Most lumber today is from sustainable forests. And the use of other sustainable materials, bamboo for flooring, for example, are becoming big.

Wide range of sustainable flooring benefits the home and the world.

Imagine a time when used tires and old gym shoes are actually useful, when they can be used for good rather than to clog landfills. That time is now.