The best places to buy hardwood flooring are big box stores, trusted online retailers, and your local flooring specialists. Big box stores are best for budget flooring, online retailers are best for convenience (and prices), and local flooring stores are great for advice and a greater selection of products.
Where To Buy Wood Flooring
Finally, for the largest choice of wood flooring, you can browse major manufacturers online and then find a local small flooring retailer to order from. Prices might be slightly higher but you often get better, more personalized service from a small family run local retailer.
Wayfair is a very interesting online retailer that you should take a look at, they sell over 7 million products for the home from over 7000 suppliers, including of course hardwood flooring. We saw close to (a staggering) 2200 hardwood products on offer, including all the most popular brands and styles, with prices ranging from $2.87 to $20.45 per square foot. A great place to start your research if nothing else!
If Eco-friendly flooring is important to you then one of the best places to find green and sustainable harvested hardwood is Green Building Supply. They sell three quality brands, EcoTimber, Kahrs and US Floors and while the selection is quite limited the options are attractive and reasonably priced between $5 and $10 per square foot.
South Cyprus is another online flooring retailer that we really like. Their website is a pleasure to browse with a great layout and great images that will definitely get your design inspiration juices flowing! They have a good selection of hardwoods from established brands like Anderson, Columbia, Mannington, Mohawk, Mullican and more. And what they lack in quantity they make up for in quality choices with prices between $2.70 to $12.79.
This is a dedicated flooring retailer we like, with 54 stores nationwide and with new stores to come. Their physical stores are complimented by a website that is easy to use and easy to navigate. More importantly their focus is on delivering flooring products at wholesale prices to homeowners and contractors alike. At the time of writing they were offering 210 different solid and engineered hardwoods ranging in price from $1.69 to $7.20 per sq/ft
You can get both solid and engineered hardwood from Home Depot along with everything else you need from underlayment, molding and trim through to tools if you plan to do the work yourself. You can schedule a pro to come and measure your project and they provide installation services. However installation is outsourced to local contractors so why not approach local contractors yourself for free estimates and control the business relationship. The range of brands is good while not exceptional, Bruce, Mokawk, Shaw and Home Legend are among the better known names.
There are still thousands of small local and family run retailers too numerous to mention here, but later in this article we show you how to find the ones that stock the hardwood flooring brands that you like the most. The number of national retailers that specialize solely in flooring, as opposed to the general home improvement stores, is much more limited, in fact here we offer just three retailers.
Yes, for quite some time now the well-known national carpeting store has been selling all kinds of home flooring including wood, laminate, vinyl and tile. Like quite a few flooring retailers they work exclusively with their own store brands (Invincible, Rustic River and Voyager). They have a decent and very varied range of products covering many different species and installation types. Prices are higher than some others with most hardwood costing between $5 and $12 per square foot.
You can learn more about engineered hardwood floors in our core guide which covers buying, installation prices and maintenance. And click here for our reviews of the best engineered hardwood flooring brands.
Our goal is to deliver high-quality information to help homeowners decide which type of flooring to install in their homes. We work closely with qualified flooring contractors throughout the USA to provide installation and repair services for home flooring products.
Love wood floors? It's no wonder. Wood is rich looking, warm, durable and easy to keep clean. It's still the most seductive and charming type of floor in a home. But it's also a big investment, one that you'll live with for a long time. In this article, we'll tell you how to size up the many types of wood floors available and make the choice that best fits your home and budget. Most wood floors fall into two categories with unique characteristics: solid wood and laminated (layered). We'll tell you the strengths and weaknesses of each type, as well as the price range and the skills needed if you want to install them yourself. Finally, we'll include buying advice we gleaned from wood floor experts.
Unfinished 3/4-in.-thick strips are nailed, sanded and finished on site, making this type of floor the most labor-intensive choice. It can be custom-stained for the exact color desired. Widely available in many grades of oak and maple, and almost any other species by special order. Cost: $3 to $5 per sq. ft. for flooring (oak) and finish; $8 to $12 per sq. ft. professionally installed and finished.
Prefinished strips offer more precise milling and the slight edge bevels allow nailing without sanding. The strips have a tough, factory-applied finish in a limited choice of stains and species, mostly oak and maple. Cost: $4 to $6 per sq. ft. for flooring (oak); $8 to $12 professionally installed.
Unfinished flooring must be sanded. You'll need to rent a flooring nailer and a sander. Laying a solid wood floor requires some carpentry experience. You may need a power miter saw and a table saw for cutting smooth transitions to other types of flooring and for other details.
Expands and contracts with humidity changes. Expect slight cracks to open between strips during the dry season unless you control indoor humidity year-round. The cracks will be prominent in light-colored wood.
Lay a pad and snap or glue together floating floors. Clamps hold glued edges tight until they dry. With the floating technique, you don't fasten the flooring to the subfloor. Rather you glue or snap the edges of the boards together to make a solid sheet that rests on a pad. This technique works well over concrete as well as wood subfloors. A floating floor must be free to expand and contract. Use special transitions to cover the edges where the floor meets carpeting, tile, stairs and other types of flooring. Buy a sound-deadening pad from a dealer; floating floors tend to be loud underfoot.
Do-it-yourself?
A floating floor is easy to lay but requires simple carpentry skills around edges and transitions. When edge-gluing, use special clamps to make sure the joints stay tight until the glue dries. Rent or buy these clamps from the flooring dealer if you do it yourself.
Glue laminated strips to dry, flat subfloors much as you would do with tile. Most types of laminated floors can be glued to a wood subfloor or dry concrete. However, when the wood contracts, a glue-down floor is more prone to gaps at the joints than a floating floor is.
Bruce is a place to look when you just know you want some good old-fashioned oak flooring. They have options for finishes, though nothing too vast and unexpected. This is a place to go for streamlined searching.
While this Vermont-based company specializes in wide-plank flooring, where the wood comes from trees that are sustainably harvested by hand, it also offers engineered hardwood, antique wood, and custom pre-finished flooring options.
Paris Ceramics is a big flooring resource for interior designers and architects. Resources that are used are found throughout Europe as well as globally. Despite the name, the company is a large carrier for high-quality wood.
Goodwin Heart Pine is a company located in Micanopy, Florida, that specializes in reclaiming antique heart pine and heart cypress from rivers and old buildings to produce lumber for flooring, stair parts, and millwork.
The Virginia-based company has been around for nearly 40 years, transforming reclaimed wood into antique floors. Mountain Lumber Co. travels the globe collecting antique wood from abandoned structures to make your floor.
When it comes to flooring, there's nothing quite as elegant or sophisticated as solid hardwood flooring. Solid hardwood floors are beautiful, durable, low-maintenance, and effortlessly impressive. They can work well in all home styles, from rustic country dwellings to modern, minimalist apartments, and you'll find the finest selection of solid hardwood flooring solutions with Floor & Decor.
There are many benefits to buying solid hardwood flooring like an oak floor, hickory floor, or acacia floor. You can choose from a massive range of colors, wood grains, and styles to suit any home, and our solid hardwood floor solutions are immensely durable and low-maintenance too. Each pre-finished hardwood floor comes with a protective finish to help it last longer, with only minimal cleaning required.
Floor & Decor can help you find the finest solid hardwood flooring for your home and other structures in a wide range of finishes, sizes, and colors to suit the precise nature and needs of your project. Whether you want a walnut, maple, birch, cherry, or oak floor, you'll find it here.
When it comes to hardwood flooring, you can often find some good deals online. Many of the online retailers are able to leverage their scale to bring you lower costs. Also, unlike many retail stores, they are not paying for expensive rents for prime retail space.
Shopping for hardwood online is not for everyone. But for those that do prefer this method, I wanted to help you find the best places to purchase hardwood floors online. These places have a good variety, reasonable prices, and they are reputable so they stand behind their delivery.
They have a large selection of hardwood floors, and I love their search capability. In addition to the ability to search by species, construction and color, you can also search by gloss level, edge type, surface texture and hardness.
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