subject: Walnut Flooring: What You Need to Know [print this page] Walnut Flooring: What You Need to Know Walnut Flooring: What You Need to Know
Giving a room a dark or intense character, walnut flooring, with its brown, purplish color, contrasts with light-colored dcor or blends right in. Without any alterations, walnut flooring has a highly-contrasting appearance. This domestic flooring has heartwood in a rich dark brown to purplish-black shade and white- to tan-colored sapwood. For uniformity, however, some hardwood flooring manufacturers steam walnut lumber to bleed the darker color from the heartwood into the sapwood. If color variation is particularly important to you, lower grades have sharper contrast.
Walnut hardwood flooring has straight and open grain, with a pore arrangement similar to hickory: closed and moderately rough in texture. Walnut flooring can be easily added to your home and finished. With a Janka scale rating of 1010, walnut is durable and somewhat dense and has substantial shock resistance. Additionally, machining, sanding, and finishing walnut are straightforward.
Walnut's color contrasts are so sharp and unique that staining seems excessive, and only a basic varnish should be applied. Adding multiple coats of polyurethane to accent the hardwood's grain is one recommendation.
How can walnut flooring be used in your home? The darker shade is ideal as a highlighting material for light- or medium-colored floors or can be used as a border.
A domestic hardwood, walnut flooring can be added anywhere in your home. Moderately common with manufacturers, walnut flooring comes in solid and engineered varieties, and even laminate can imitate the appearance of this domestic hardwood. Solid hardwood flooring, which ranges in size from 3/4ths to 5/16ths of an inch, can be sanded as many times as possible, but it can only be placed at ground level or above; too much moisture can make solid hardwood expand or warp.
Engineered walnut flooring, on the other hand, can be placed anywhere: below, at, or above ground level and above concrete or a radiating heat source. Composed of 100-percent hardwood, engineered flooring will have a ply of walnut on top and different species in lower plies. Engineered walnut flooring does not expand or contract as much as solid hardwood but can only be sanded a limited number of times.
