When we bought our house, the first thing I wanted to do was replace the existing pergo floors with clean, naturally-finished, white oak flooring.
Flooring, to me, sets the scene in a room. It’s not just a visual thing, although the right flooring can do wonders to brighten up a room, but a tactile feeling as well. Walking around barefoot on wood floors is a wonderful feeling. In fact, wood floors actually provide a warm temperature boost, and provide a sense of hominess that can’t be replicated with engineered wood, no matter how high the quality is.
Our house came with dark brown pergo floors- yuck! I hated the color, the texture, everything about them. To me, replacing the flooring in the whole house was worth the investment. And, yeah, it was a big investment, one that I hadn’t really accounted for. As you may or may not know, the price of lumber skyrocketed in 2020 due to the pandemic. Demand for wood shot up, based on a few different factors:
- People were stuck at home and therefore wanted to do updates to their houses like building new decks, sheds, etc. and had the funds to do so because they weren’t taking vacations.
- Homebuilders sharply increased construction due to cheap mortgages combined with high demand.
- Labor shortages started occurring at mills because of COVID-19 outbreaks and difficulty hiring.
- Supply chain issues such as a shortage of truck drivers has made the cost of transporting goods higher, and transit times longer.
While prices seem to be returning back to regular levels now, at the time we bought the house, prices were still really high. In fact, lumber prices rose by more than 250% in the last year. Unfortunately for us, that meant we had to spend more than what we had budgeted for on our new white oak flooring.
The thing about flooring is that you pretty much have to install it before you move in, for obvious reasons. For us, this was a problem. The family living in the house only gave us two weeks from the time they moved out to when our lease was up at our apartment in Brooklyn. So on top of the extra costs for the materials, we had to pay for expedited construction (i.e. more workers) to get them installed quickly so that we could move in. It was a tight timeline but we made it!
In the end, it was somewhat of a big blow to our budget, but not something we were willing to compromise on. To me, it was worth every penny. I view it not only as an investment in the house, but also an aesthetic improvement that will stay in style and classic forever.
My Top 7 Reasons for Choosing White Oak Flooring
So why did I choose white oak flooring over other types of wood floors? Here are my top 7 reasons:
- Durable: White oak floors are much more resistant to wear and tear than pine, for example. It won’t show dings and dents if you are prone to dropping things (like me!)
- Water Resistant: compared to other types of flooring like red oak, white oak is a closed-grain wood, which means that it is more resistant to water, rot, and decay. While this doesn’t mean that it’s waterproof, it does offer a bit of piece of mind.
- Clean and Modern Looking: White oak has less graining and rings that grow close together. This gives it a uniform, sleek, look that, in my opinion, is timeless.
- Cost-effective: Although we were suffering from a lumber shortage when we installed the flooring, white oak was one of the more cost-effective options and wasn’t hard to come by. It grows abundantly in North America so getting it is not usually a problem.
- Easy to Stain: White Oak is a great canvas for experimenting with different stains and treatments. In its natural state (the look we went for), it is a great neutral that goes with almost any color palette, but is easily stained darker or lighter depending on the look you want.
- Texture: White Oak Flooring ages really well and can even take on a more “distressed” look if that’s what you’re going for. I think the floors get better with age, and wear in nicely, giving a comfortable feel underfoot.
- Works well in small spaces: White oak flooring has a linear sap streak which draws the eye along the length of the planks. This means that it can visually add length or width to small spaces, where a busy grain might overwhelm them.
Did you use white oak flooring in your space? Comment below and let me know what you think!
