Meet the Preservation Collection: Inspired by our best-selling floors with an 8-week lead time.
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Everything you want to know about Oak flooring. Prized for its beauty as well as its affordability, Oak flooring is a popular choice for home and business owners when installing hardwood floors in their space. In this short introduction to Oak hardwood flooring, we’ll answer your questions and look at the many options available to you as you consider Oak flooring for your home or business.
Oak wood flooring is a surface made with boards cut from Oak trees, a common hardwood species found throughout the world. To create Oak flooring, strips of wood from Oak trees are cut and milled to produce straight planks which are affixed to a subsurface with nails, glue or staples. The wood is sanded to create a smooth surface and then coated with sealants to protect the wood from moisture and to make the floor more resistant to wear. Before sealing, Oak flooring may also be stained in a wide variety of colors to meet the needs of an interior design scheme.
Customers choose Oak when they want a surface that:
• Is simple to stain – Oak is a porous hardwood and can absorb stain very well.
• Can be refinished – Oak can be refinished multiple times, adding many years to the life of an Oak floor.
• Is easy to work with – Oak is a highly workable hardwood which makes installation faster and less costly.
• Offers lots of flexibility – Oak floors can be produced as solid or engineered wood flooring, and can be distressed in a wide variety of ways to add texture and character.
At Carlisle, you have a variety of options for customizing your flooring surfaces.
Selecting the wood – In addition to choosing White Oak or Red Oak flooring, Carlisle also offers Rift and Quartersawn White Oak floors. These floorboards are cut at 90-degree angles to the core to produce boards with straight parallel lines for a strikingly beautiful hardwood floor. We also offer Reclaimed Oak floors with boards taken from the floors, joists, beams, siding and carrier timbers of old buildings. In addition to Oak flooring, Carlisle offers a variety of hardwood species, including Ash floors and Birch hardwood floors, as well as three species of Pine floors.
Choosing the grade – At Carlisle, we offer three proprietary grades of wood to help you create just the right look for your Oak flooring. Our Original Grade features boards with more grain variation, knots and character for a more rustic look. Our Heirloom Grade has a more luxurious and refined look, with less variation in the grain and fewer knots. Our Signature Grade features a 50/50 blend of our Original and Heirloom Grades allowing for the appearance of natural characteristics amidst the cleaner more formal boards. This grade is reminiscent of the original wood floors when the craftsman used the entire timber to make a floor.
Deciding on width – Carlisle Oak flooring comes in widths up to 20 inches. The greater the width, the more spacious your room will feel. Choosing a consistent width produces a more uniform look, while varying widths can add additional visual interest to your floor.
Adding texture – Carlisle craftsmen can texture or distress your Oak flooring to add a sense of heritage, craftsmanship and warmth. Textured Oak floors look and feel as if they have been lived on for generations.
Selecting a color – While some manufacturers offer only a limited number of stain colors, at Carlisle you can stain your Oak flooring in virtually any color.
Oak flooring is easy to clean – a simple mixture of 1 or 2 ounces of white vinegar with 2 gallons of water produces a solution that can easily loosen dirt and contaminants while being safe for the floor and for the environment. When a vinegar solution is not strong enough, a product like LOBA Hardwood Floor Cleaner can help to provide a deeper clean.
When distressing a floor, craftsmen use a variety of techniques to make new floorboards look and feel much older. Distressing Oak flooring may involve the addition of saw swirls and kerfs, adding hand-scraped edges, and using techniques that give floorboards the undulating patterns of floorboards that have been worn down from time and foot traffic.
Reclaimed Oak flooring is made with boards that are salvaged from old buildings like barns and factories. The wood retains all the imperfections and character that come with decades or centuries of foot traffic and exposure to the weather. Reclaimed flooring may have nail holes, wormholes, splits and cracks, and saw marks from a time when boards were cut at early sawmills.
Where solid Red Oak flooring or White Oak flooring is made with boards cut from a single piece of hardwood, engineered Oak flooring is made with a veneer of Oak that is glued to multiple layers of a backing material. This type of construction makes engineered floorboards more resistant to moisture and temperature changes that may be found in settings like a basement or in installations over concrete slabs or radiant heat.
Prefinished Oak flooring is sanded, stained and sealed before it is installed. Using prefinished flooring enables home and business owners to avoid the mess and inconvenience of finishing a floor on site. Installing prefinished floors is often faster and less costly. And while some prefinished Oak flooring has traditionally had a cheap or plastic appearance, prefinished floors from Carlisle are produced with proprietary techniques that make them every bit as beautiful, elegant and durable as floors that are finished on site.
Both Red and White Oak floors can be stained in a wide variety of colors.
Red Oak has a Janka hardness rating of 1290. White Oak is slightly harder, with the Janka rating of 1350.
White Oak and Red Oak are the two most common types of Oak flooring. Red Oak hardwood flooring is actually lighter than White Oak and has hues that tend to be more in the reddish pink range., with wide and highly visible grain patterns. White Oak has browner undertones with dramatic grain patterns that range from simple and sleek to intricate, vibrant swirls.
Carlisle has been a leader in flooring fashion since 1966, producing wide plank Oak flooring and other types of hardwood floors of exceptional beauty and durability. Each Carlisle floor is a hand-crafted masterpiece designed to reflect the owner’s sense of style and taste. Our floors become a defining feature of any space and a welcome reminder of where you are every time you cross the threshold. It’s no wonder that Carlisle floors are found in beautiful homes throughout the world, as well as museums, trendy restaurants and upscale retail sites everywhere.
