subject: Adding Hickory Flooring to Your Home [print this page] Adding Hickory Flooring to Your Home Adding Hickory Flooring to Your Home
Known for a reddish color and striped appearance, hickory is characterized by tan to red heartwood and white to cream sapwood with fine darkly-colored lines. Hickory does not have a uniform appearance, however, and spring and summer woods differ. Harder than most domestic species, hickory flooring has a Janka scale rating of 1820 and has closed but defined grain with a rough texture.
Because of the hardness and rough grain, adding hickory flooring to your home is somewhat difficult but not impossible. Hand tools are not ideal for cutting or installing hickory flooring, and machining, sanding, and staining are also not easy. Additionally, the wood's tongues have a tendency to split when nailed.
Ordinary sandpaper is not sufficient for sanding hickory flooring, and instead a belt sander is recommended. Hickory needs to be sanded with the grain and multiple belts should be used. Start sanding hickory flooring with an 80-grit belt, and then move up to a 120 grit to smooth out the appearance. Use a 220-grit belt for finishing touches.
After the wood is sanded, a conditioner should be applied to close of imperfect graining and to prevent blotching when a stain is applied. The conditioner makes adding a stain easier, and because hickory has a contrasting appearance with notable reddish heartwood, a darker stain may hide these qualities. Much like preserving the appearance of walnut, hickory flooring just needs a few coats of polyurethane. Instead of painting on the finish, pour it on and smooth it out with a foam applicator. The floor will have raised grain, and using a floor polisher in between coats evens out the appearance.
Hickory flooring comes in prefinished and unfinished varieties, as well as in solid and engineered hardwoods. If you do not want to go through the hassle of sanding, staining, and finishing hickory wood, opt to install prefinished hardwood into your home.
Prefinished and unfinished hickory flooring comes in engineered and solid options. Both are 100-percent hardwood, but solid flooring can be sanded several times. Solid flooring expands and warps when exposed to moisture, and if you want to add hardwood flooring below ground level, go with engineered, which expands and contracts less and can be installed over concrete or a radiating heat source.
