18 Oct

Finish to order

Finish and Install, Our favorite Finishes

single use floor covers such as laminate and LVT

15 Apr

Engineered versus solid wood Floors

Misconceptions, Misdirections and Misinformation, Customer Bill of Rights

Searching the internet provides ads in disguise

Research and compare engineered versus solid wood floors; throw in LVT and laminate floor covers for kicks. As a buyer, online marketing and most local stores will have you buying covers not floors. What do we mean? Real wood is floor you buy whereas engineered and the rest, a floor cover. Comparing engineered versus real wood floors and you are comparing an investment to a product designed to fail. Yes, some are better than others, but all floor covers have planned obsolesce in the blueprints. Want to read more- Investment Flooring. No matter how you keep score, engineered versus real wood is an unfair comparison. Hailed as a great innovation for homeowners, engineered floors are more popular than ever. Flooring companies love them because of the repeat business, huge margins and time savings compared to real wood.

Solid versus engineered

Solid versus engineered wood floors should be rhetorical, but not today. The market has convinced buyers that veneers glued to composites are a better way to go than real solid wood. Plastics that will end up in landfills handle moisture better than real wood, give me a break. Repeat business demands reusable products and engineered floors are perfect in the role. Real wood last forever, engineered, laminate and others all end up in landfills.

Marketing in disguise

Remember, the “media” or resource pages such as Angie’s List are paid for by marketing dollars paid by people wanting to sell you LVT or laminate. Therefore, the research articles you read are 100% generated by someone with a product behind the posts, a sponsor of sorts.

Antique Reclaimed Heart Pine with saw marks

Baseball, Apple Pie and Southern Pine

It has to be real wood. Southern Pine, real wood, is the most Eco-friendly choice for your floor, period. The exceptions, of course, are endangered or illegal timber, but that is not relevant to our discussion. Our New Heart Pine is not farmed and take from private landowners. While our Yellow Pine is sourced from North Louisiana, farmed timber. That is great information but the reason the real wood is green? IT LAST FOREVER. In […]

Box Store Pine Floors

Box store pine floors are not as good as ours and they are more expensive. Let me repeat, apples to apples they way more expensive. And even their cheaper stuff is stupid expensive for what it is, or certainly what it is not. In world where laminate and hardwood are regularly used to market some floor cover, you might want to use a healthy skepticism when floor shopping. Rule number 1- or at least the […]

Dog Friendly

2024 Dog Friendly Floors Update Dog friendly floors are all about the finish. Of course, you will here that real wood is not good for big dogs or even dogs in general. This is simply not true, at all. However, before we talk about the finish, we should address the question of Southern Pine and if it is a dog friendly floor. There is so much confusion regarding pine because there are so many variations [...]

Girl laying on pallet while pine acclimating prior to being glued down and face nailed

How long does acclimation take?

How long does acclimation take? Asking how long does acclimation take has no honest answer only experience and product knowledge. Acclimation, sometimes called conditioning, is the process of allowing wood to reach its equilibrium moisture content (EMC) within “normal living conditions.” It is also one of the most important steps of hardwood floor installation. How long does acclimation take? My installer said 2 weeks! How long does acclimation take? Acclimation is not about time but [...]

The eco-friendly floor

Green, eco-friendly floors are about longevity Our company offers homeowners the power to choose an investment versus a product. The difference? An investment increases in value when a product is designed to wear out and then replaced. One outlives the house, the others on average, about 7 years. So I ask, which is the green floor? But wait don't you cut down trees to get real wood? Yes, once and it does not involved any [...]

Southern Pine Durability

Southern Yellow Pine durability should not be in question as one day it will be the only thing of value left of your home.

11 Apr

The eco-friendly floor

Misconceptions, Misdirections and Misinformation

12 Feb

Sustainable Timber

Misconceptions, Misdirections and Misinformation

Sustainable timber, i.e., timber that has been harvested and replenished which may occur naturally or farmed. ‘Sustainable Forestry’, however, involves more than just planting a tree when you cut one down. Sustainable timber management or forestry means doing no ecological damage to the surrounding environment.

Plant a tree

To those who want to help stop Global Warming- buy a real wood floor and plant a tree.

Healthy, sustainably harvested timber creates forest that become more resistant to wildfire, insects, disease, and the impacts of climate change. Like so many things, the message that the timber industry and sustainable forestry are contributing to climate change has gotten distorted. When you consider the replacement products we use instead of wood, i.e., petroleum-based vinyl, composites, and plastic the eco-friendly product is obviously real wood. What about concrete and steel? “As conservationists, we make building materials that store carbon and require far fewer fossil fuels to produce compared to steel and concrete.” (Forest2Market.com September 2022).

Sustainable timber means green

As trees grow, they absorb carbon dioxide CO2 from the atmosphere and release oxygen. We learned this in junior high. Not only do trees sequester or hold carbon, but they also put it to use. Great but what happens when you turn this tree into a floor? Wood flooring is about 50 percent carbon by dry weight. Wood products continue to store much of this carbon indefinitely. In the case of buildings, the carbon is kept out of the atmosphere for the lifetime of the structure—or longer if the wood is reclaimed and used to manufacture other products.

Plant more trees

In national parks and designated wilderness areas, the federal government is prohibited by law from sustainably harvesting and replanting trees. According to U.S. Forest Service-Forest Inventory and Analysis data, lands set aside from active forest management – such as parks and wilderness – serve as a carbon source because trees are dying at faster rates than they are growing.

Sustainable timber create floors that last forever

No matter what else you hear while shopping, solid 3/4 floors should outlive the house, i.e., be salvaged one day. On the other hand, all ‘floor covers’ with very few exceptions, everything else ends up in a landfill. Seriously, the bathroom counter-top you see here was produced by a novice salvaged decking.

No clear cutting

To be clear, we are not talking about clear cutting or harvesting non sustainable forest. Anti-forestry activists cling to the flawed assumption that old trees will sequester and store carbon. As if old trees are immortal and should be forever untouched. Not so fast! The science is that younger trees sequester carbon at higher rates than older trees, yes. Even worse, when older trees die, they emit carbon and methane.

Failing to clear dead trees causes wildfires

Conservationists are not to be confused with anti-forestry activists, even though the media often gives them that label. Anti-forestry activists reject Indigenous knowledge and experience that comes from thousands of years of managing forests, while raising millions of dollars to perpetuate the idea that the United States risk deforestation. Far from scarce, many western landscapes, “have overstocked stands with more trees than the forests can support”.

Salvaged pine decking using skins 1/2 thick

16 Aug

Why homeowners buy LVT

Customer Bill of Rights, Wood Floor Shopping

Why do people buy ‘single use’ floors? (A product designed with planned obsolescence ridiculous promises and useless warranties.)

LVT MARKETING- Waterproof- Lifetime Warranty-and Luxury in the name.

Homeowners buy it because the marketing is amazing and frankly trying to find real wood wears them out over time. Hand it to the majors, they’ve created a repeat customer product line; a new one about every decade or so. The industry is a mess everyone wants fake wood or vinyl or plastic; whatever can be torn up and thrown in a landfill one day to make room for another ‘single use’ cover. Manufactures and their distributors have four conventions per year and one huge one just to talk about all the new and latest technology that they are going to sell homeowners. All of this is to perpetuate a population of consumers and salespeople buying into a false premise, fake is better than real.

Real wood is Green

Repurpose real wood

Repurpose real wood – salvaged or reclaimed. We want everyone to repurpose real wood. With that in mind, please enjoy this video which cost us $75.00 six years ago, We are “thrifty” like most of our customers, but the content is good. Salvaged is ‘saved’, reclaimed is repurposed; and not the kind of repurposing we are talking about with our folk art. The video should clear it up and if you are shopping for reclaimed […]

Knotty Southern Yellow Pine floors MI lake

Glue down Southern Pine

In reality, you can glue down Southern Pine in standard 3/4 thickness. No problem, you want to glue down Southern Pine you use Bostiks Best. It has a built in moisture barrier and is urethane based so that is allows movement like a nail. But today, in this blog glue down Southern Pine is 1/2 inch, with the long lengths up to 14′ an option. SYP Direct does not sell anything but real wood and […]

How to identify Heart Pine

Welcome to our blog post on how to identify heart pine. To be clear, we are talking about how to identify New Heart Pine. In this informative guide, we will provide you with valuable insights on recognizing heartwood, and in a broader context, ‘heart content’. Both of these are essential for those homeowners (installation professionals) looking for quality New Heart Pine. Quality is easy to define, with the end result being an installation and a […]