Anyone that owns an older property in South Africa is quite likely to be familiar with the nature of solid wooden flooring. In the past, these floors were often made from yellowwood or Podocarpus latifolius, since declared as the national tree of South Africa. Today, however, where this type of surface is installed, it will normally have been manufactured using planks made from, the considerably cheaper and far more common, oak or walnut trees.

Simply polished or oiled and even without the adornment provided by carpets or rugs, these surfaces can look quite magnificent. Their natural patina endows them with a distinctive character that tends to improve with age. At the same time, the strength and resilience of the raw material provides a walking surface that is both stable and comfortable. Underfoot, the excellent insulating properties of these surfaces manage to provide a sensation of natural warmth that is not easy to duplicate.

While in the past, a building's subfloors were designed with the use of solid wooden flooring in mind, installing these surfaces on more recent premises will require observing certain precautions. Unlike certain composite or synthetic products, these are not suitable for direct contact with the concrete subfloors that are widely used today and it will be necessary to construct a framework to which the planks may be securely attached with the use of nails while leaving a clear space between the boards and the concrete below.

Typically, these surfaces will be composed of planks of standard thickness and length. They must be supported at intervals that are sufficiently distant to allow a degree of spring in the surface but not so far apart that any excess pressure could cause the boards to crack. Installation is thus a task that calls for some expertise.

Although available in natural colours, the planks may also be coloured and one means of achieving this is with the use of pigmented oils. These oils also act as a natural preservative that, in addition, serves to add a surface shine. These tough surfaces can, if need be, sanded to remove stains or imperfections, but as routine maintenance, regular sweeping with a soft broom and occasional waxing and buffing is all that should be necessary. For the larger commercial areas, ride-on and walk-behind mechanical polishers are the ideal tool while, in the home, the smaller, manual models are more than adequate.

Price and Performance Depend on Product Type

For those with an adequate budget, the higher cost of solid wooden flooring can, nevertheless, represent a sound investment as well as providing an exceptionally elegant pedestrian surface. There are, however, a number of perfectly viable alternatives that can serve equally as well while some of them may also require a much more modest investment on the part of the home or business owner.

One other means by which timber may be used on surfaces is in the form of tiles rather than planks. The individual segments are normally quite small and available in a variety of geometric shapes such as squares, triangles and lozenges. These, in turn, may be arranged in a variety of decorative patterns of which the most common is probably herringbone, though chevrons and block patterns are also very popular. Again, hardwoods such as oak and walnut provide the raw material from which these so-called parquet tiles are normally composed and so their routine care will actually differ very little from that required for other timber surfaces that are formed using planks.

A perfectly good alternative to the use of a 100% timber structure is provided by a product known as engineered wood. In some cases this will consist of an upper layer of more expensive timber bonded to one or more layers of a less expensive material while in cheaper versions of the product the supporting material may be a synthetic but strong composite. Of these the former structure is incredibly strong especially when the successive layers are bonded at right angles to one another.

Last but certainly not least are the various laminated products that so successfully mimic not just solid wooden flooring but other natural surfaces such as granite, slate as well as ceramic tiles. Though these layered products are considerably less expensive than genuine timber surfaces, they do display much of their properties and can be exceptionally durable and long-lived when of manufactured to sufficiently high standards. Though today, a photographic image has replaced real veneers, the end product remains elegant.