Speciality New Oak Explained
Solid
A lot of research goes into finding the correct supply of oak for our core stock. The importance of tree selection marks the beginning of our long and personalised process with the floor order for each client. Selectively sourced, our flooring is made from mountain European oak, which is a slower grown species because of the rocky soils with less water content. Also, the character within the oak is better distributed throughout the tree because of the steady and regular growing pace of the tree, this makes it a perfect and reliable choice for our floor finishes. Similar to genuine reclaimed oaks from at least the last century in Europe, slower grown oak has a tighter grain and produces a more stable wood structure.
Mountain oak is also sourced for the production of wine and whiskey barrels because of the higher tannin content. Only with a significant amount of tannin in the wood can we create our hand-made and custom finishes.
Mountain oak is specific to The Reclaimed Flooring Co and we use this prized oak for both our solid and our engineered range of flooring. Unlike other companies, we will never buy cheaper oaks from China which are commonplace in the Uk flooring market. For our products to remain stable throughout the year, we only buy our oak from regular and regulated suppliers.
Engineered
Engineered flooring means a multi-layered floorboard, constructed of solid oak for the top layer and Plywood, softwood or hardwood strips for the ‘engineered section’ with a softwood/hardwood base. The purpose of this production is to create a more stable wood flooring product, as wood is a natural product it will shrink and expand throughout the year and this can cause problems if not dealt with correctly.
The finest 100% solid birch ply backs our engineered oak floorboards. We harmoniously match the same specific weight per m3 with our Mountain Oak top layers and our solid Birch Ply base. The acoustic values for both sections of the board match to produce the same high-quality sound when walked upon which is equal to our traditional solid oak floorboards, so the wood floor feels solid.