Unfinished wood floors have existed much longer than their counterparts, the prefinished wood floors. While prefinished wood floors are more common today, unfinished hardwood flooring has been making a comeback in popularity.

Basically, unfinished hardwood floors are put together with flooring panels that are raw. So it is left for the person installing unfinished hardwood to manually sand, stain, buffer, and coat the floors. These steps are all much more work than the entire installation process of prefinished hardwood floors. These are very time consuming processes that can only be truly enjoyed by those who love woodworking. It is easy to see why prefinished floors have become so popular.

Of course, the fact that unfinished remain popular suggests that there are benefits to unfinished floors beyond just loving to work with wood. One of the advantages is that when a good woodworker does the job by hand, the attention to detail results in a much higher quality than factory produced finished panels can. When you do it yourself, you have control over bringing out the natural beauty of the wood grain.

Another advantage is that you can make sure there is a level of continuity in the floor. Everything will be applied to the complete floor, rather than fitting individual panels that were finished separately and hoping the finish was applied at consistent enough levels that all of the panels match perfectly.

One of the major advantages of unfinished wood panels can be seen when you are putting a hardwood floor in a building that already has hardwood floors. It may simply be impossible to find a prefinished floor that comes close to matching the other floors in the building. However, it is not so difficult to find matching wood grain in an unfinished floor and add finish to mimic the original finish color and gloss.

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Yet another benefit of unfinished floors is that they are more stable because they are fit together and sanded after placement. Prefinished floors cannot be this stable because the individual panels are finished separately. This is usually a pretty big issue in commercial buildings that get a lot of daily traffic.

Finally, unfinished floors are usually made of the highest quality domestic oak. Floors made of white oak or red oak tend to have a bright color with a coarse grain pattern. This translates into a bright and vibrant room appeal. However, if oak isn’t your thing, you’ll be glad to know that unfinished hardwood floors come in a much wider variety of woods than prefinished floors do. This means no matter what your floor needs, an unfinished floor can fit.