Hello.

Thanks Boo for pointing me to this thread. I think I have replied to you (ms.)?

Here's my advice.

Determine first what look you want like shade, color, etc. Are you particular with Natural or Stained? Some people want authentic color so they go for natural color. Some people don't care. Are you particular with the grain of the wood? Like Narra with Fire-ly grain or ribbon grain like Tanguile? If not, you can choose any wood that suits your budget, install it, sand it (to align and even out the surface), stained it (paint it with different shade of color) and protect it with Polyurethane Topcoats. ANY wood will do if you are not particular with specie or grain or color authenticity. Go for T&G Solid Floor in your local hardware/lumber store.

Laminated Floorings are invented to make flooring more affordable if you are particular with grain pattern/color and have limited budget. Get from a branded supplier! Generic supplier tend to have alignment and durability problems . A test for a good laminated flooring is if you spilled something it shouldn't expand immediately. Installation SHOULD be cheap.

Something close to solid wood are engineered wood flooring. Engineered wood flooring is 2nd most expensive flooring (solid lumber and t&g flooring being the most expensive). It is made of plywood with an expensive layer of veneer or thin sheets of solid lumber around 5mm thick. Get from branded supplier. There are lots of substandard plywoods nowadays. There's one in BGC that cost around 8000/sqm 😉 without installation. Same with laminated flooring, installation should be cheap.

Why some wood are more expensive than others? Because it's harder to get nowadays or it is imported. Narra, for example, sells for 300-400/bdft (and you get undersize -meaning for 1 inch thick the actual size is 15mm to 18mm not 25mm). It is not the best wood (no offense to Narra lovers out there) in the Philippines but it is rare and it is our national tree! The rarer the tree the more expensive it is specially those tree that are including in the logging ban. People who buys Narra are more of in to bragging rights.

Tip: Generally Speaking, wider wood (6" above) looks better than narrower wood (5" below).

HTH

so, it was your company whose advertisement (e.g. beech wood) i saw in the inquirer before :-). thanks for sharing the above information, especially about the engineered wood, which i find really interesting, related to my other research interest of using bamboo as a home construction material.

last week, my wife's chopping block gave way and i have to quickly make her a new one using some hardwood that i have in stock at home. what caught my attention was the old chopping block before i was about to burn it 🙂 he he he. the old chopping block (12" x 18" x 1" thick), we bought it a few months back, it was made of engineered wood - rectangular sticks of bamboo, glued and pressed together to form a wood plank which was then cut into smaller sizes to make kitchen chopping blocks. the only reason why the block did not last long was because the engineered bamboo wood did not have any protection from water - after constantly washing it for a few months, the glue gave way and the bamboo sticks just separated from each other :-).

bamboo does not require a high tech machine to turn it into an engineered wood which could be made into different products - wood tiles, wood planks. FYI, the chopping block was locally made here in PH. with a renewable supply of bamboo here in PH, it's really worth while to do a cost-benefit analysis of this type of business 🙂 ... e.g. the wood planks for making chopping boards, if you make the length of each plank 1m and use a router table to make a T&G on each side of the plank, it's already a wood flooring product 🙂 ... cheers

Boo!

by the way matimco's flooring is at 6.6k /sqm accdg to the site mentioned above.

anyway, be careful of commercial chopping block particularly engineered ones, stained and painted ones too. they contain chemicals which can contaminated your food!

Mineral oil which you can buy from mercury drugstore is enough to proctect your chopping block.

wow, mahal din pala ... for the chopping block i made, since it's hardwood, i never bothered on using anything to protect it. thanks for the tip on using mineral oil and where to get them ... cheers

Boo!

As for me, I hate laminate and love wood floors so I would pick wood and put the effort into keeping the rooms well ventilated for a while. We have installed 4 hardwood floors, all solid tongue and groove style that was finished professionally after installation.

Very interesting blog. A lot of blogs I see these days don't really provide anything that I'm interested in, but I'm most definitely interested in this one. Just thought that I would post and let you know.
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I like the laminate most. It's cheaper and easier to care for. I have a laminate floor in the kitchen and this isn't a problem, I think that a wooden floor would be damaged by moisture. It's also much easier to clean the laminate; I found a lot of useful tips for cleaning the laminate on this article https://bestcleaneradviser.com/what-can-you-use-to-clean-laminate-floors/ . I think this is the best flooring that can be used for home.