What are the main differences between pre-finished and unfinished wood floor installation?

Pre-finished hardwood flooring has been finished – sanded, stained, and coated with polyurethane – in a factory. It only needs to be installed, which means it’s cut and nail it to the subfloor. Your new floor is done. This type of flooring is factory-finished. Each board has been finished individually with sprayed-on coats of polyurethane. The boards are then oven baked with aluminum oxide to create an extremely hard acrylic finish. Because each board is finished individually, this creates a beveled edge along each side of the board. When pre-finished hardwood flooring is installed, there will be a micro-bevel or groove in between each board. This creates a floor that is not totally flat, and each board will have a visible line in between it. 

Unfinished flooring is raw hardwood that must first be installed and then sanded and refinished on site. Unfinished flooring is raw wood with no beveled edges. When unfinished hardwood flooring is sanded and finished on site, there are no lines in between the boards, and you will get a perfectly flat, smooth floor.

Advantages to Pre-finished Floor Installation

Time: Pre-finished flooring is a faster process. Once pre-finished flooring is installed, you can walk on it and put furniture on it immediately. With an unfinished hardwood floor, the sanding process may take several days and then you will have to wait another several days to put furniture back on the floor.

Less Mess: Pre-finished flooring is less messy than an unfinished floor that will need to go through a sanding process. Sanding does create dust during the actual sanding process, though our dustless system definitely cuts down on the mess.

No Smell: With pre-finished flooring, there are no chemical smells because there are no chemicals being applied. The flooring has already treated in the factory where it was made. It is true that the smell from refinishing and applying an oil based polyurethane is intense, difficult to deal with, and not healthy to inhale; however, with the new green products that we recommend and use, our clients do not have to deal with the harsh smell and/or chemicals of an oil based poly. For applications of oil based polyurethane, we insist that our clients be out of the house. For most residential homes, we use Bona water based polyurethanes which have very low VOCs, are environmentally friendly, and have almost no smell at all. We also recommend and frequently use Rubio oils, which have NO VOCs and no smell.

Cost: Pre-finished flooring usually costs less overall than unfinished flooring. Though pre-finished flooring may cost more for the actual material, with the reduced labor costs of only an installation, pre-finished flooring usually ends up being less expensive than unfinished hardwood flooring that is installed and then sanded and finished on site.

Advantages of Unfinished Floor Installation

Appearance: Unfinished flooring looks like real wood. It is our opinion that pre-finished flooring looks plastic-y and factory-made, with a less noticeable grain pattern making it appear less warm. Unfinished hardwood that has been finished on site by an expert hardwood flooring professional looks like a work of art. There is nothing that compares to the natural warmth and beauty of a hardwood floor that has been sanded and treated by a real craftsman. 

Finish Options: The creative possibilities with unfinished floors are nearly unlimited. From the countless different species of wood available, to innumerable stain colors, to the many different finish options, the sky is the limit with unfinished floors. We also do all of the new finish options including hardwax oils like Rubio Monocoat. We can create a blue or even a green floor! 

Matching existing flooring in the home: If you have existing hardwood flooring in the home that you want to match, adding unfinished wood flooring is the way to go. You will be able to match the species of wood, and a professional hardwood floor refinisher can play with stains and colors on the unfinished wood to match the existing floor.

Uniform stain color: Pre-finished flooring that is stained a dark color will only be stained on the face of the board. Because of the beveled edge, when a darkly stained pre-finished floor is installed, sometimes you can see the underside or lighter portion of the wood along the edges when you look at the floor from far away. When unfinished hardwood is installed and finished on site, the wood is smooth and uniform, and stain is applied to all visible areas.

Cleaning: The beveled edges of a pre-finished floor also create a trap for additional dirt, dust, and grime which can be more difficult to clean than a floor that has been finished on site and is totally flat.

Repairs: If a hardwood floor that has been finished on site gets scratched, it can be spot repaired by taping off boards and sanding those individual boards down to raw wood and then refinishing them. If pre-finished flooring becomes scratched, a whole section of the floor may need to be replaced, or the entire floor may need to be sanded in order to correct the problem.

Over time, both pre-finished and unfinished flooring will get some surface scratches from normal wear and tear. Unfinished flooring that has been treated with a water based or an oil based polyurethane can be buffed and re-coated every few years to revitalize the top coat of poly and remove surface scratches. We highly recommend you maintained your hardwood floors by doing this process every couple of years, homeowners will substantially prolong the lifetime of their floors! This buff and coat procedure is not an option for pre-finished flooring. Pre-finished flooring can be sanded down to raw wood, but due to the high number of polyurethane coats applied in the factory, the wood must be sanded down deeper into the material than a hardwood floor that was sanded and treated on site. This means that a pre-finished floor cannot be sanded as many times as an unfinished floor as it will more quickly become too thin to re-sand. And with pre-finished flooring, the beveled edge will be decreased with sanding, but it will never go away completely.

Hardwood floor installation for both types of wood flooring is available, feel free to call us for advice!

We serve Cary and the Greater Triangle area