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A compilation of features and advice to provide greater insight into our unique products and inspiration for your projects

 

Wood flooring grades are used to describe the amount of natural variation and quantity and size of knots that should be expected in a wood floor, so it is important to understand them before you choose one. It is also important to understand that they are not a description of quality.

Rustic grade wood flooring for example could be expected to feature large and small knots as well as plenty of natural colour variation. Luxury grade wood flooring on the other hand would normally feature very little colour variation and few if any knots. Both can create beautiful, high quality wood floors.

So far, so good, but there is a complication – wood flooring grades are not standard, so different companies have different grading conventions. This means that a rustic grade wood floor from one supplier may not be at all comparable with a rustic grade wood floor from another, despite having the same name. It can also be hard to tell if this is the case, as many suppliers don't explain their grades, or where they do the details are typically quite technical and hard to relate to the way a floor will actually look once fitted. That is why at Broadleaf we have our own names for our wood flooring grades and define these in plain English with minimal technical terminology.

Another key thing to understand about wood flooring grades is that they can never be exhaustive. Timber is, unashamedly, a natural product. There may be more knots in once batch than in another, or more or less colour variation. A wood flooring grade is a spectrum, and a floor should be expected to fall within it, not to contain every element, in a fixed and predictable quantity. Many manufacturers only have 2 grades, which means that the spectrum is very broad. At Broadleaf, we have 4 grades, which means that each one has a more defined spectrum of variation and a more definite aesthetic.

Last but not least, you can't talk about wood flooring grades without talking about wood flooring finishes. The finish that you put onto a particular grade of wood flooring can have a significant impact on how much of the natural variation is visible. A rustic wood floor that features plenty of knots and colour variation will look very different if finished in a rich, nut brown tone than with a wash of white. The first will mask most of the knots, blend in much of the colour variation and overall give the finished floor a much less rustic look, whilst the second will highest these and make the floor look more rustic than it did before the boards were finished. This is why floors of the same grade, in different finishes, can look at first glance as though they have quite different natural characteristics.