With an appearance of sharply contrasting shades, walnut flooring consists of a dark brown to purplish heartwood and white to tan heartwood. This night-and-day color combination becomes the focus of every room and ideally contrasts with your dcor. Some hardwood manufacturers want a uniform appearance for walnut flooring, and as a result, they steam the wood, letting the darker heartwood shade bleed into the sapwood. For walnut flooring with the most contrast, go with a lower grade.
Adding walnut flooring to your home is a straightforward procedure. The wood has a straight and open grain and has a similar pore arrangement as hickory: closed and moderately rough. With a Janka scale rating of 1010, walnut flooring is durable and provides sufficient shock resistance. Walnut flooring is easily sanded, nailed, and finished.
The dark heartwood and light sapwood combination is one of the primary reasons many buy walnut flooring, and this color contrast needs to be preserved through finishing. A stain is not necessary for walnut flooring, and instead, multiple coats of polyurethane accent the grain.
What's the best way to use walnut flooring around your home? The dark color makes walnut ideal for accenting wood of a lighter shade and for use as a border.
Depending upon the amount of walnut flooring you need, prefinished or unfinished hardwood may be best for your home. Prefinished flooring, in general, is helpful for installing a full floor. Unfinished, on the other hand, is best for matching new wood with old.
Walnut flooring comes in solid and engineered varieties. Solid flooring is fully walnut wood, while engineered displays walnut on top, but plys below may be another species. Each type has advantages and disadvantages. If you want to add engineered walnut flooring to your home, the wood can be placed at or above ground level and, because this type of hardwood expands and contracts less, can be placed on top of concrete and a radiating heat source. Engineered, however, can only be sanded a few times, but solid hardwood can be sanded as many times as you need. Solid walnut flooring, however, expands or warps from moisture and cannot be placed below ground level.
