Flooring update...

Flooring update...  Well, after two days of work, the flooring crew has the hickory flooring down on most of my office and a bit of the adjacent rooms.  The black strapping you see in the photo is part of a clamp that's keeping all the boards tightly pulled together while the glue dries.  The boxes piled up are weights to keep the boards all pressed to the floor.  There are several clamps and lots of these boxes scattered about to keep the whole assembly in place.

For the curious, this is an engineered hardwood flooring product, 5/8" thick.  Essentially that means it's high quality plywood with a fairly thick veneer of hickory on the side that shows.  The flooring folks recommended this for the basement, because the floor is being installed directly to the concrete floor.  Because concrete is permeable to water, there will likely be some moisture that gets to the wood.  Solid hardwood (the traditional style) is likely to warp in such a circumstance, whereas engineered wood, because the plies are oriented crosswise, will be much less likely to warp.  

Hickory naturally has a lot of color variation and a lot of visible grain.  The product I selected includes some small knots, which adds some additional variation.  The photo at left shows a closeup view of one small section of the floor, to give you an idea what this looks like.  I love all this variation, but I'm told that most people – and all right-thinking people – prefer more consistent patterns and gentler variations.  To them I say “Fine.  Let me have the good stuff!”