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Craftsman Jon Ulicney Explains All Your Hardwood Flooring Options

Jon Ulicney talks hardwood flooring options.

Steve Stack:

Brought to you direct from Studio 3B at Baird Brothers Fine Hardwoods, American Hardwood Advisor is your source for trends, tips, and insights into how the building industry has evolved. 

Join me, Steve Stack, along with guest builders and industry leaders, as we talk shop and go in-depth on what it takes to be the best of the best. 

Dive into topics like architecture, industry trends, project plans, historical tools, tricks of the trade, and life lessons from more than six decades of experience in the hardwood lumber business.

Tips from the Hardwood Flooring Expert

Steve Stack:

Hi, everyone. We’re back here again today with our friend, Jon Ulicney, the craftsman who really brought Studio 3B to life here at Baird Brothers Fine Hardwoods in Canfield, Ohio. Today, we’re going to talk about some flooring that we’ve used on the project, and probably some other species also. You completed this flooring install here, Jon. Right now, below our feet, is this beautiful antique oak floor. I believe we used a five and six-inch combination pattern on this one and it really turned out nice. So, Jon, again, thanks for being here. Everything’s been well?

Jon Ulicney:

Everything’s well.

Steve Stack:

Good. Family’s good?

Jon Ulicney:

Family’s good.

Steve Stack:

Those new grandkids are good?

Jon Ulicney:

They’re really good. Yeah.

Steve Stack:

Wonderful. In this part of the studio workshop area that we’re in, the studio revolves around the stage that you created. So, we’re using it for our podcast and interviews. It’s going to become, and it already has become, a huge asset to the company as we’re inviting folks in like yourself and your expertise. 

Whether we’re talking shop, or we’re talking to the DIY-er, or the folks at home that want a weekend project, we’re going to have those discussions here. So, you’ve created a real nice little corner that’s going to help a lot of folks out.

Jon Ulicney:

Okay. I hope so.

Steve Stack:

We didn’t know that when we were doing it, did we?

Jon Ulicney:

Yeah.

Steve Stack:

So, we’ve got this flooring on the stage area here. We thought it would be a good idea to pull some of the antique oak elements out of it. At the far end of the workshop, we created that beautiful flat panel square sticking antique oak door that compliments each other and kind of pulls the rooms together. You installed that unit. That was a heavy bugger, wasn’t it?

Jon Ulicney:

Yes, it was.

Steve Stack:

That was good. But going back to the flooring, had you used this product (the antique oak) prior to using it on a stage here?

Jon Ulicney:

Yeah. I have probably used it several times. When it first came out, I wasn’t sure about it. But, when you see the whole floor down, you say, “This is great. It looks good.”

Steve Stack:

I’ve described it numerous times to family, friends, prospects, possible customers. In your words, describe the floor for me. What characteristics does it have?

Jon Ulicney:

I feel like I’m walking into an older building. I work in a lot of older houses in town here. I have one that, for example, has the original floors from the 1860s in it. This makes me feel like I’m walking in that house.

Steve Stack:

It works to my taste and my personality, and I know you dabble in the antiques and you like some antiques. I am the same, but through the characteristics, we’ve got some saw curve left in it. We have some band marks left in it. We have the hit and skip planing or milling, in the case of the flooring. We have some of the knots.

I’m looking down and I’m seeing pieces of wood that were sawn near or close to the Y or the crotch of a tree, so you get that dense grain and that pearling effect. So you’ve got grain variation, you’ve got texture variation, you have color variation, and we just clear coated this, right?

Jon Ulicney:

Correct. Yeah.

Unique Grain Patterns on Real Wood Planks 

Steve Stack:

So you’ve got the different patinas of all those elements that we mentioned. The saw curve versus the plain smooth surface are opposite ends of the spectrum as far as the colors it generates when you apply a finish to it. It really turned out to be a very interesting floor.

Jon Ulicney:

Yeah, I love it. I think it’s absolutely great.

Steve Stack:

Durability?

Jon Ulicney:

Durability. You have the oak durability, you have the stability of oak with it. It’s all there. Then you have these interesting colors and designs in it. It’s just enjoyable for me to put down.

Steve Stack:

It really has turned out to be a nice floor. We have contractors that use our floor and we have homeowners and DIY-ers that buy from Baird. So, a big part of Studio 3B is that it’s going to give people ideas and maybe help educate them. 

Before I go there, I felt like I was just trying to sell you antique oak floor. But, I know you’ve got a first love, and we’ve talked about it previously, you really enjoy the quarter sawn white oak or the quarter sawn red oak. Tell me a little bit about that. What makes it different from a plain sawn white oak or a plain sawn red?

Jon Ulicney:

For me, first of all when I’m finished, I look across, it has such a flat look. It’s stable. The expansion on the quarter sawn is different than what this floor would be, because this floor expands across the width while the quarter sawn expands across the length. I just like the quarter sawn, it’s just a personal preference to me. We put floors in houses locally here and we had one customer that said, “Well, give a suggestion.” I said, “Why don’t you try quarter sawn?” And they put it in. The next thing we know, we ripped all the flooring out of the rest of the house, which was all hickory and whatever. We ended up putting the red oak quarter sawn flooring because they just loved it so much.

Steve Stack:

For the folks at home, the difference between the quarter sawn and the flat sawn or plain sawn, as it’s referred to as, it’s how the sawyer (the gentleman running the sawmill) addresses the log and how he cuts in a quarter. If you imagine the end of a log and quarter it like a pie. You expose the growth lines at a different angle to the surface of the board, correct?

Jon Ulicney:

Correct. So you have straight grains.

Steve Stack:

Okay. In doing that, you expose, I believe it’s called the medullary rays, that throws something that is called flake. So you’re looking at the same piece of white oak or red oak in some of the other species, but because our eye is looking at the growth ring of that log at a different angle, it’s a completely different appearance.

Jon Ulicney:

Right. It just comes right up.

Steve Stack:

That’s a good way to say it, Jon. It welcomes you.

Jon Ulicney:

Right. A lot of furniture was made out of quarter sawn oak. It’s just a different way, but it’s a beautiful way of sawing it and making it look different. So when you have these oak floors, there’s just so many ways to have it. You guys provide that at Baird Brothers, too.

Solid Wood: A High-Quality Flooring Material

Steve Stack:

Yeah. We like selling real hardwood flooring and all of the oak family, along with the cherry and the walnut. We try and educate folks up-front, let common sense come into play. Are we putting it in a living room, kitchen, or high traffic area? Are we going to put it in the formal dining room or are we going to put it in our private library or home office?

We use a hardness scale resource called the Janka table. It measures the face density of whatever wood species we’re talking about. It’s a good guideline. But tried and true, being here in northeast Ohio, you’ve been in them, I’ve been in them. They knew back in the 1950s that red oak and white oak was a good hardwood floor

 

Jon Ulicney:

It’s a good hardwood floor.

 

Steve Stack:

They’re still in homes today.

Jon Ulicney:

That’s what I have in my house. I have red oak and white oak in my house.

Steve Stack:

I don’t know, we weren’t going to talk about it today, but that goes back to something we need to try to educate our customers, a generation about. It’s a word we use around here a lot: value. So we’re talking about homes where the floor was installed back in the 1950s, it could have been covered in carpet the last 60 years. Pull that carpeting up, either take the project on yourself or hire a professional floor refinisher, have him come in to refinish and you have brand-new red oak or white oak floors.

Jon Ulicney:

And it’ll be there for years.

Steve Stack:

Right. So that initial homeowner got 60-70 years of value. The new homeowners, they’re right up to speed with today’s trends and colors and everything about it. So it’s safe to say hardwood flooring has value.

Jon Ulicney:

It has value. It’s probably one of the most popular jobs in the last few years that we do. I mean, everybody wants to change the floors and install the hardwood. It’s healthier for you. There’s so many good aspects about putting in hardwood flooring.

Steve Stack:

Very true. You mentioned that you’ve been installing a lot of hardwood floor. We’re not going to write down and tell folks step-by-step today, but I know a veteran craftsman like yourself, you’ve got some tricks. Some of them are very basic. Some of them are actually more scientific. You go into a home, tell us your mindset and your approach.

Jon Ulicney:

To doing the job or…?

Steve Stack:

To looking at the job from, somebody invites them into your home or into their home and say, “Jon, come out and give me a price.” You go to the house, I know there are certain things you look for. Okay. Moisture being one.

Jon Ulicney:

Key things. First of all, what room is it in? That’s the start. That’s really important. When you’re putting in your hardwood floor, people want to put their hardwood floors in bathrooms and kitchens. You can do it, you just have to be a little more careful about it, that’s all. Make sure that you’re not going to be, if water gets down there, that you’ll be able to repair it if something would happen. That’s the other thing though, you can repair any of the floors, you need to know that.

Steve Stack:

I’m going to interject something right there, correct product for correct situation, right?

Jon Ulicney:

Yeah.

Steve Stack:

That’s as simple as common sense. We still have folks that request pine flooring with the realization that pine is softer and it’s going to nick, dent, and get marked up. But that’s what they’re shooting for, that distressed look, that doesn’t bother them. If you want that formal clean look, we’re going to steer you to your favorite, the quarter sawn white. You’re not going to beat the face density on it. It is very favorable as far as expansion and contraction, right?

Jon Ulicney:

Right.

Choosing A Natural Wood Look for Your New Flooring

Steve Stack:

So there’s a lot of information to be weighed out in choosing the right hardwood flooring product for your home. So with that, I mentioned moisture. That is for the health of the inside environment within our homes. It’s just not about our hardwood floor, it’s about all the products in our home. 

So we want to control that through humidification, dehumidification, and air conditioning. Two different products with two different purposes: dehumidifiers and air conditioners. One conditions the air, the other removes moisture out of the air. We highly suggest those products, and it’s good for the life of the floor, right?

Jon Ulicney:

Right. For example, in the summertime you’re going to remove the water out of your house, where you’re going to dehumidify. But in the wintertime coming right after fall, you want to try to check your humidity in the house. You want to try to keep it around 40% if you can, 35-40%. Because in the winter, the floors can actually shrink if there’s not enough water in the house. So it’s pretty much through the year, keeping the house at 40% humidity.

Steve Stack:

Over the course of the years, especially with hardwood flooring, but all of the hardwood products we offer here (our interior doors, our moldings, the flooring, our wood countertops), I’ve used it over the years and I described the inside environment of your home like a pendulum. We swing to summer, and then we swing back to winter. Our house is doing that same thing. It’s our job as homeowners to regulate the swing of that pendulum, that 40% number that you threw out, it’s right there in the middle.

Jon Ulicney:

Right.

Steve Stack:

We can be too dry in the winter, down 15-20%. We start to feel it in our sinuses. In the summer, even here in northeast, Ohio, we’ll see humidity at 70-80%. That comes inside of our home. Everything in our home, just like our bodies, react to that. It’s our job as homeowners to regulate, slow that pendulum movement, keep it stable, keep it happy.

Jon Ulicney:

And then the floor will look exactly the same all year.

Steve Stack:

Just for conversation’s sake, you’re a professional contractor, but it’s not a terrible homeowner project. Do a little research. Educate yourself a little bit on it. But, what tools are they going to need?

Jon Ulicney:

Basic tools, a simple cutoff saw to cut it. I would rent a power nailer. If you’re not wanting to use a compressor, they actually have the ratchet nailers that work just fine, and chalk line, a broom. Basically, those are the tools. You go in, you remove your carpet, you clean the floor, you make sure there’s no dust or debris. You’ll look at your room, decide which way the flooring’s going to run.

Normally, the flooring will run perpendicular to all the floor joists. Then, when you decide that, then you chalk a line to get started, first two, three pieces on chalk lines. After that, go right across. You also have to put an underlayment paper down. That’s usually just with staples.

Steve Stack:

Yeah. There’s different options as far as the underlayment paper. I remember back that you used one of two things, you used 15 pound felt or you used red rosin paper.

Jon Ulicney:

Red rosin paper. Right.

Steve Stack:

The felt paper acted as a moisture barrier to prevent moisture from, whether it be the basement or a floor below, coming up through the floor through joist through the sub floor and getting to the underside of the hardwood floor, acting as a moisture barrier. It worked very well for years and years and years. It had a couple downfalls if you were walking on it and then stepping up onto the floor, whether it be prefinished or unfinished, you could track some tar emulsion up onto it. 

Guys love the red rosin paper. It was workable. You didn’t have the tar aspect. Actually, correct me if I’m wrong, when you put the board down and were tapping it to the adjacent board, it actually slid quite a bit better on that red rosin than it did the tar paper.

Jon Ulicney:

Right. That was the purpose of the red rosin, to let the floor move.

Steve Stack:

Okay. So somewhere down the line, a few years ago, somebody came up with a great idea, and it’s a product that we handle here at Baird Brothers: the Aquabar. It’s a blend of a red rosin paper topped with a tar layer emulsion, and then finally topped off with another top layer of red rosin. So you get the benefits of both; the vapor barrier protection of the tar emulsion motion and the workability of the red rosin. That’s a great product. 

Jon Ulicney:

That’s my favorite, that product. Yeah.

Steve Stack:

Yeah. That’s the product that we used underneath our antique oak floor here at Studio 3B. There’s a lot to talk about if you do reading and research about acclimating a floor to its final environment. There’s a lot of different ways to approach that. There’s a lot of influencing conditions that come into how long you have to acclimate a floor. Winter time, we are very fortunate here. We like to see our floor wind up in a heated home, not temporary heat, we want furnaces running, we want air exchange occurring. We take flooring in the wintertime, especially, right out of our warehouse, deliver it to a job site, and guys install it in the same afternoon.

Jon Ulicney:

Right.

Steve Stack:

One thing comes into play there: all the buildings on our facility are heated. It’s coming out of a heated warehouse, conditioned at a nice relative humidity at a six to eight percent moisture content, and it’s going to a job site with a permanent heating system, functioning, that house has been conditioned to receive a hardwood floor. You can put that flooring in that afternoon.

Jon Ulicney:

Yes, you can. And we do that. The basic things are, you’ll go out, and I still have a little tool where I can test the humidity. I test the subfloor always to see what the subfloor is. But most of the time in the winter when you test it, pretty much it’s right where it needs to be and the floor can go right down.

You just don’t drive the floor tight in the winter time because it is going to expand, because no matter how much humidity, you will get more humidity in the summer, in the spring and it will expand. So you just don’t want to drive that floor so tight that it can’t move. That’s one of the things you have to do.

Steve Stack:

Very much so. You mentioned it, and it’s available to the DIY-ers, the homeowners. By all means, any flooring contractor should have one in their tool forte, a moisture meter. National Hardwood Flooring Association, they wrote the Bible on hardwood flooring. It’s available to our viewers to visit their website. Great guidelines, great tips.

Jon Ulicney:

Right.

Steve Stack:

So we’ve had job sites where we’ve introduced lumber. When lumber’s received, you can stack it up in a corner. “What’s a cross stack, Steve?” Well, you run a layer of flooring and then you alternate your layers and you run it the other direction, and you leave space between the bundles, right?

Jon Ulicney:

Correct.

Steve Stack:

Why do we do that?

Jon Ulicney:

Air moves. We actually meet your trucks. If we’re doing a hardwood floor, we’ll call in and ask, “When will the truck be there?” They’re very good about it, they’ll give me a time. We get there when the truck gets there, and then we take it all in and we always cross stack it, so that air can move around it. It’s not in a garage, it’s not anywhere, it goes from your conditioning to the other house.

Steve Stack:

That’s just one of those tips that if there is acclamation taking place because of the stacking procedure, it’s doing it across that whole order of flooring. The bundle on the bottom is getting the same air as the bundle in the middle. That’s very important. The wood is still alive and it reacts. You want it to react equally. In either case, picking up moisture or taking moisture away, it’s going to be done slowly, but that is a natural way to keep good airflow and keep that floor happy.

We talked about the paper in the underlayment, that’s a very important process. You mentioned a few minutes ago, a broom or a vacuum, that’s as common sense as it gets. You have debris on the floor, whether it be dirt or wood shavings, whatever, if you lay your paper out and you put your hardwood floor on top of that paper and nail it down, you’ve got a hardwood floor, in a sense, laying on marbles.

Jon Ulicney:

Yes. Exactly.

Steve Stack:

Right. So that little extra 15 minutes to vacuum that room pays dividends.

Jon Ulicney:

And you get a chance to look and make sure existing nails in the initial flooring that’s there are down. It just gives you a couple of moments to take a look at what you’re doing before you start.

Steve Stack:

That’s a great point, Jon, because whether it’s as simple as going back across the floor and a tap with a hammer to reset the head of the nail into the subfloor, or in the case that the subfloors were screwed down, hitting them with a screw gun. Because if you have loose underlayment, you’re going to have a loose hardwood floor, and the two together are going to create squeaks.

Jon Ulicney:

Correct.

Steve Stack:

Nobody wants to walk across a squeaky floor, unless you’re a parent and you want to hear your kids coming in at night, right?

Jon Ulicney:

Yes.

Steve Stack:

So same thing with stairs, right?

Jon Ulicney:

Right. Yeah.

Steve Stack:

But a very, very avoidable situation, but you have to know to do that.

Jon Ulicney:

Right, just simple stuff.

Steve Stack:

Exactly. It’s not rocket science.

Find the Best Flooring Choice For You

Jon Ulicney:

No. The floor’s a great DIY project for people. I believe you could just do it in one weekend. Especially if you use your prefinished floors from Baird Brothers, you can put the flooring, move your furniture back on the same day and be in it that evening.

Steve Stack:

There’s pros and cons to either installing unfinished flooring or installing the prefinished floors. We offer them both. We’re good with whatever the reasoning. You cannot argue with the convenience of a prefinished floor. You literally can walk into someone’s home with the floor being there, they can go to work. And maybe it’s just a dining room, 12 by 16 foot dining room or 14, whatever. In preparing your work day, having the furniture removed from that room, they can go to work, you can install hardwood floor, reinstall shoe mold quarter-round, and they can come home and move that furniture back into that room and have dinner there that evening. Not so with the unfinished. Take us through the steps of unfinished, finished  onsite.

Jon Ulicney:

Unfinished, for example, would be probably the floor finishers. You want to use a professional finisher to come in. They will come in and they will sand probably for six hours on a floor, or maybe more. After sand it and clean it, they’ll put their first coat of finish. That’ll have to dry overnight. Then they’ll come back and give it another coat of finish. That’ll dry overnight. Usually, nowadays you’re getting three to four coats of finish with the waterborne products they’re using. Whereas with the prefinished floor, you put the floor in, clean up your mess ,and you’re gone and it’s done. That’s it. And you have a durable finish.

Steve Stack:

Yeah. Here at Baird, we offer a very good floor finish on our prefinished products. The biggest limitation is the color choices. We offer nine or ten now, different color choices on all of the different species of wood. If it’s a large enough project, we will look at creating a custom color for folks, but there’s an advantage compared to the unfinished install.

You’ve seen it hundreds of times, I’ve witnessed it, the floor finisher will come in. Whether that homeowner is trying to match some of the wood assets of their furniture and tables, couch arms, whatever the case may be, the hutch that they love and they want that color, a floor finisher can come in and he’ll do two foot by two square foot swatches and apply different variety of color stains to match whether it be the couch or the coffee tables or the hutch, and the homeowner will walk in and they’ll say, “I like the one in the middle.”

Jon Ulicney:

And they’ll finish it that way.

Steve Stack:

And that professional floor finisher has dialed that in to match that furniture element exactly. So that is, in my mind, one of the biggest advantages of the unfinished.

Jon Ulicney:

It also, too, if you have people put additions on, and we’ll go back out and we’ll add on to the floor, we’ll extend the floor out for them. And in that case, the in-house finisher will come in and he can make a perfect match going out. Usually, what if it’s one of your prefinished floors? We can get it matched up here, but a lot of times you have older oak floors that are down and they can come in and make it look just like the older oak floor.

Steve Stack:

So I don’t even want to say there’s disadvantages to one or the other, I’m going to be more positive and say, you have to look for the advantages that fits your project the best.

Jon Ulicney:

That’s what you do, what works for you best. If you can use prefinished for the ease of it, that’s a good way to go if you can.

Types of Hardwood Flooring

Steve Stack:

One of the other biggest design approaches for years and years and years, hardwood floors were what we call a square edge floor. Meaning that when the two independent pieces were married together with the tongue and groove, that surface was flush and a seamless joinery, right?

Jon Ulicney:

Correct.

Steve Stack:

That almost, or it does require, a sanding on-site finishing and the old-school process. With prefinishing becoming more and more popular over the years, a new description has evolved and we call it micro-V. So the reason for the micro-V, it is a very softly broken edge on both the tongue and groove side on the face of the board. We prefinish it. And when those boards are married on the job site, if there’s the slightest difference in height, whether it be because of installation, whatever the case, that micro-V actually disguises that elevation change.

Jon Ulicney:

Right. Correct.

Steve Stack:

And it allows you to install a prefinished floor in your home. It’s not the old deep V-groove that we’re familiar with. That’s why it’s referred to as a micro-V. It will identify the individual boards a little more so, but it serves the purpose of allowing us to prefinish the floor and have it installed in your home.

Jon Ulicney:

And it is so minute. We use that a lot. But when we got back to the flat floors, it seems like that’s coming back in style again. We’re getting people that are wanting their floors because we can’t do it prefinished, but they want that flat look. They don’t want any Vs or anything. So that’s where we’re getting the unfinished floors, where we’re putting them in right now.

Steve Stack:

The square edge is, not that you can’t accomplish a traditional or formal look with the micro-V edge, but if you’re going to be a strict traditionalist or a very staunch formal, you’re going to elect to go the extra mile and put the square edge unfinished job site finish floor in, right?

Jon Ulicney:

Yes. I have square edge in my house, but I replaced the floor here last year. I went with the micro-V, and it looks just perfect. I’m really happy with it.

Steve Stack:

That said, and we have samples in our showroom illustrating both, coming back to our antique oak floor here at the studio, it has the micro. It fits this floor, this area very well. But in stating that, the antique oak floor, Jon, is kind of unique in our product offerings as far as hardwood floors. Was there anything different as far as the installation of this floor versus let’s go to the other end of the spectrum that everybody knows, the old three quarter by two and a quarter square edge red oak flooring, the traditional, what we called strip flooring? Any difference in the installation?

Jon Ulicney:

It’s quicker. This is a lot quicker when you have a six inch and five inch floor. When you have six inch floor, for example, you’re putting three boards down with the old way, as you’re putting one to get the same area. So for a DIY situation, this is perfect. I just take a little more concern when I have my end to make sure we have enough expansion. Also, I’m careful on how I nail this floor, too. I don’t drive it so tight, because the six inch board and the five, I tend to think there might be a little more growth.

Steve Stack:

Well, and that’s a great point. I referenced the National Hardwood Flooring Association earlier. Like I said, they have some great guidelines to follow along with a lot of great information. But as an industry standard, a two and a quarter inch oak strip floor is allowed to grow, or to contract, and create a gap between the boards, the thickness of a dime.

They deem that normal and acceptable gapping. That’s a two and a quarter inch width board. We’ve used six inch material here, just shy of three times the width: longer growth ring, more expansion and contraction. So you can see up to, very possibly, two or three times the expansion and contraction in a wide plank floor than you can a traditional strip two and a quarter inch floor, right?

Jon Ulicney:

Right.

Steve Stack:

That has to be taken into consideration. And to your point, as far as allowing the grow room to the perimeter walls and just being aware of that, that “okay, the floor is in.” Your job’s over, but the homeowner‘s job just begins in maintaining the environment inside of that home.

Jon Ulicney:

Correct. It’s very important.

Steve Stack:

Something we always like, not that we like it, we appreciate it when we have homeowners call in early and they say, “My floor’s changing a little bit. What’s it doing?” Well, you can only realize so much through a phone conversation. Maybe send some pictures. If you’re in our local area, we might suggest having one of our representatives stop out and take some moisture or relative humidity test.

At that point, before we completely lose the floor due to unacceptable conditions or environmental situation, whatever it may be, now we can take corrective measures to reel that floor back in and get it settled and happy again. So, pay attention. It’s just like your refrigerator. If your refrigerator starts making noise, you call the serviceman, right?

Jon Ulicney:

Right.

Steve Stack:

Then it’s the same thing with the hardwood floor, you pay attention to it.

Jon Ulicney:

And you can lose the floors real quick. 

Steve Stack:

Very much so.

Jon Ulicney:

If you get somebody that would be, for example, when the floor is not fully expanded, they’ll drive it so tight and then the humidity goes up and then the floor starts to peak at the joints. Before it gets too bad, if you know, then you can get the humidity down, it will go back. But if you let it go, it’ll be very hard to get it back.

Steve Stack:

It really doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about carpeting, whether we’re talking about linoleum, marble, porcelain tile, or hardwood floor. There’s a certain amount of care involved for any of the product lines.

Jon Ulicney:

Right.

Steve Stack:

So we’ve discussed today, we talked about our antique oak floor here that I’m really pleased with. We talked about your favorite, the quarter sawn white. We have the red oak species, the plain sawn white oak species. We have the cherry, the maple. The hickory is very popular right now, both in the select grade and the character grade. It’s a little temperamental. 

Jon Ulicney:

Yes.

Steve Stack:

It will historically react quicker to atmospheric changes than some of the other species. So you’re going to babysit that one, but it will make you a lifelong floor.

Your Trusted Retailer for Solid Wood Flooring

So you mentioned an addition or purchasing a home that has an existing floor, and you want to add another room or two, you can accomplish that. We might have a color that’s close enough. You might have to go the onsite finishing way. We’ve talked colors, installation, finishing, a few hints here. Some very basic information. But I invite people all the time, visit the National Hardwood Flooring Association’s website. Call a reputable contractor, like yourself. Call our folks, and we’ll walk you through and make sure that you wind up with that beautiful hardwood floor that you’re imagining.

Jon Ulicney:

The salesmen here really have a real good grip on it because they’ve been around it for so long. They understand the expansion and contraction of it. They understand how to help the homeowner get through purchasing it and helping with colors.

Steve Stack:

And through those resources, your contractor, National Hardwood Flooring Association, the sales people here at Baird Brothers, we’re going to accomplish a beautiful floor for you.

Jon Ulicney:

Yes.

Steve Stack:

Jon, again, thanks for visiting this afternoon. I appreciate it.

Jon Ulicney:

All right.

Steve Stack:

I hope the work continues good, but don’t work too hard. Okay?

Jon Ulicney:

I love working. I love going out every day.

Steve Stack:

All right. You take care, buddy.

Jon Ulicney:

Thank you.

Steve Stack:

For all you folks listening, thanks for talking shop with Baird Brothers Fine Hardwoods. If you enjoyed this episode and want to stay up-to-date with our American Hardwood Advisor series, give us a like and subscribe. For more tips, projects and inspiration, check us out on Facebook, Instagram or at https://www.bairdbrothers.com. Until next time!