woodflooringtrends

After a busy season of traveling, where I get behind on my posts it’s always so difficult to get started again.  I keep hearing the words of social media expert Paul Guillin in my head telling me “you just have to keep at the blogging thing for a year before you’ll really see the results”.  In theory I think he’s right, but at the same time not having seen the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow it gets difficult at times to keep moving along.  However, I have passed some milestones in the social media arena this year.  I thought I’d highlight them here for you.  Maybe it will serve to motivate your efforts and reinvigorate my own.

1) I sold a wood floor on twitter.  I’d have to be honest and say this was not intentional but it did happen.  I was searching around the twittersphere to see who was talking about wood floors.  It seems if you do this search you get predominantly 5 things.  First you get people who are saying varying versions of “I love sliding on hardwood floors in my socks!”, secondly you find people saying “I hate sleeping on my hardwood floor”, then third you get some marketing bots offering Bona floor cleaner, imagine that Bona selling in yet another arena?, fourthly you’ll find wood flooring manufacturers and contractors touting their latest product or install and lastly you’ll get homeowners who are considering having wood floors or those who have new floors asking questions.

I happened to engage one homeowner who had asked a question about tearing out carpet and replacing with wood flooring.  That tweet turned into a email conversation, then to a phone conversation and then to directing him to a local distributor of our products who sold him a floor.  Bizarre.

2)  I sold a specific floor that was highlighted on a blog post.  This was a random set of circumstances where I had posted a picture of a newly installed floor.  I got a phone call from a homeowner asking about that particular type of flooring the very next day.  Turns out he had seen that picture and it was exactly what he was looking for.  I was able to connect him with a local distributor of our products as well and he bought the floor the following week.  Doesn’t happen every week but it was interesting to see the sales cycle and its potential.

3)  I successfully used one of my boards on Pinterest to convince a customer that we had the product they were looking for.  The Pinterest showroom closed the deal.

4)  I was recognized at a trade show as a result of my blogging.  Fame!  Finally.  I was counting down the 15 seconds in my head.

I was approached by a number of people at the latest NWFA trade show in Orlando asking me a lot of questions about my social media efforts and whether or not they were paying off.  I have to say its a labor of love and the results are both difficult to measure and at this point fairly insignificant.  However I do believe the idea has merit for one reason.

When people go looking for a solution to a problem today, they rarely pick up a magazine or newspaper, they don’t turn on the radio and start scanning through stations looking for answers nor do they turn on the TV and start surfing trying to find a program or commercial that will have a product or program to solve their problem.  They do however open up a browser and type their query into a search engine.  If I can provide content that is focused on answering the questions that people are asking that pertain to wood floors then I am going to show up on the radar from time to time.  If my content answers their question then they are probably going to ask me another question and see if I can ultimately offer them a product that will solve their problem.

I’m interested to hear what others in our industry are up to in the social media world.  Chime in with thoughts and/or questions and let’s start a discussion.

Elmira College was founded in 1855 in Elmira, New York. Elmira College is noted most famously for being the home of Mark Twain’s study from which he wrote Life on the Mississippi, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  

More recently, Elmira had a interior facelift that included new hardwood floors.  For the project 44,000sqft of engineered unfinished 2 1/4″ S&B R&Q white oak was produced, including a small portion that was fumed dark to provide a contrasting color for the inlay work of purpleheart feature strip.

This project featured 2 1/4" unfinished engineered R&Q White Oak floors from Real Wood Floors in both natural and fumed tones.

I’ve been on the road for most of the month of April having most recently attended the NWFA Expo in Orlando.  Without a doubt this was the best show NWFA has put on in recent memory.  Congratulations to Michael Martin for infusing a sense of momentum and excitement back into the association.

As for the show and any visible trends, the most obvious push is still towards low-VOC hardwax oil finishes.  It seemed every manufacturer was displaying at least one line of product that utilized these new finishes.  In addition many of the finish companies were touting their new line of cleaning products specially formulated to maintain these new surface treatments.

European white oak in wide widths, a trend we spotted at Surfaces, also continues to grow in popularity particularly in grey tones with low sheens.  All in all, nothing strikingly new in terms of product trends, however the major trend noticed and one we hope continues is good attendance at this show and a sense of excitement among attendees and exhibitors.

From freshome.com, these 5″ larch floors grace an apartment in Gothenburg, Sweden.  Larch trees are native to the boreal forests of Russia and Canada.  Although they are conifers, they are also deciduous and like the bald cypress lose their needles each season.  Larch is generally similar in appearance to southern heart pine but is usually distinguishable by the small size of knots visible in the lumber.

5" Larch wood floors are used extensively in Swedish interiors.

These 3 1/4″ white oak floors are 75 years old.  I sometimes find it interesting how the wood flooring industry has moved towards hand-scraped products to simulate an aged look.  Time-worn, hand-sculpted, hand-scraped, aged, hand-hewn and the list goes on and on.  But lets be honest, the majority of the scraping we do to wood floors does not mimic what a truly old floor looks like.  It’s does add a texture to the floor, but if we really wanted to make wood floors that look truly aged, they would look like this.

These floors grace the dining room at Cafe 37 in West Plains, MO. These floors have been around for a while and they are still looking good.

Question I get often from homeowners: "will my floor scratch?" Answer: Yes, and that is when they really start looking great.

75 years of patina have left these floors looking great. Experience is not what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you.

I am in Shanghai this week for the Domotex trade show. European white oak is easily the leading trend here. Fumed, wire-brushed and gray tones continue to lead design trends.

In addition, herringbone and parquet patterns are getting strong pushes.

Here are a few product shots from the show.

One of the many things I love about my job is the variety of things I get to do.  I spend most of my day in front of a computer working on wood floor design, marketing and sales tools for the products we manufacture.  But on occasion I spend time in the Ozark hills, twenty minutes east of the middle of nowhere, watching the natural beginnings of our production process at little “mom and pop” sawmills.  These small operations dot the countryside and provide a living to countless families.  In this post, I’ll take you inside one of those small operations and give you a glimpse of the meticulous detail that goes into cutting walnut lumber to be used in wood flooring.

Above left: Select & Better grade walnut engineered flooring exhibits consistent color tone and a very limited amount of knots and other character marks. Above right: Character grade walnut engineered flooring includes color variation from dark brown to light creamy white, knots, peck (peck is named for the marks caused by woodpeckers), pith (the black streak formed at the heart of a log) and other natural characteristics of the lumber.

This week’s hardwood floor of the week showcased a natural grade walnut floor.  In that post I included a picture of some freshly cut walnut logs to show the creamy white sapwood of the tree just below the bark.  To give you an even better idea of some of the process that takes place from forest to floor I shot a few short videos to share. In this first video, you’ll see a small band-saw mill cutting into a large walnut log.  At the outset you can see the creamy white sap layer in the log and a swatch of the dark brown heartwood peeking through.  The saw cuts an 8/4 (referred to as eight-quarter, which essentially means 8 – 1/4″ measurements and is roughly 2″ thick) board and then slides it off onto the sled.  It is then moved to the edger where the mechanic is looking at each individual board and carefully trying trim in such a way as to optimize the amount of dark heartwood gleaned from each cutting.  This is painstakingly slow work but it does ensure good color selection.  This video will help you understand why we have to work with 25 different little sawmills to come up with enough lumber for our production.

In this second video you’ll see the guys examining a board after it has been run through the edger.  They are looking for color and defects and then sorting the boards into different grades of material to make different products.

Those different grades of lumber go into production to get different types of flooring products.  For example, below is a 7″ engineered walnut floor that was produced from walnut lumber that had a mix of all different grades of lumber.  So you see it has some dark brown, clean consistent boards along with some boards with color variation in the individual plank, knots and other natural characteristics.

These 7" natural grade engineered walnut floors from Real Wood Floors grace the wine cellar in a Philip Jennings Custom Homebuilders project in Dallas, Texas.

The floor seen below was made from all consistently dark, clean walnut lumber that exhibits very little character markings or variation.  Both floors provide breathtaking visuals in each setting.

These select grade walnut floors from a freshome.com post steals the show in this setting. Wide and long planks show all the true character of the timber and provide a striking visual to this interior.