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.

Stop listening to them

Yes, you can have real wood floors, even with concrete sub-floors because, yes you can glue real wood. The solution is adhesive that moves like a nail, (Bostiks Best) but I digress. The reasons “they” tell that real wood is not the right choice for your home or business, are revolve around the old adage that ‘time is money’. Real wood takes time, has no big commissions or sales contest and does not come in […]

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 [...]

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”.

Rustic does not always have knots and vice versa

19 Jul

Laminate is not wood

Misconceptions, Misdirections and Misinformation

Laminate is not wood, nor is it a floor, it is a floor cover made of chemicals and composites. Imagine a photocopy of real wood chemically bound to particle board or cheap composites. Made with synthetic materials or very thinly sliced pieces of wood, laminate equals replica. Made to look like wood grain by using a method similar to printing a photo, i.e., designed to fool those not paying attention.

Laminate is not wood- what is it?

So, in simplest terms, you print a layer of wood-colored plastic and then adhere it to a composite wood substrate like particle board.

Landfills are full of laminate and engineered floors

Laminate = landfills

As we will discuss later in our post, the variety of substrates used differ widely in quality and components. Chinese laminate manufacturers use a wide range of materials including dangerous chemicals. First, China leads the world in carbon pollution by a large and growing margin. Second, it has virtually no regulations regarding products imported and shipped back the United States.

What is in it?

The chemicals used in manufacturing laminate are dangerous and they are the fastest growing component of our landfills. ’s difficult to quantify what chemicals, will leach from laminates once they hit the landfill. Not to mention the emissions from incineration. To put it simply, this stuff doesn’t decompose, because of all the chemicals and glues, the material never breaks down organically.

Laminate is not wood imported it is re-imported

Laminated wood is a rimport, a re-imported bi product of our timber. We ship our trees to China only to bring it back home full of toxic chemicals. We send them solid wood, which requires no toxic chemicals to produce, and in return we get plastic ‘wood like’ composite garbage. Today upwards of 10% of Americans have laminate flooring or some type of vinyl. Every bit of it will end up in landfills poisoning the groundwater and damaging the air quality.

Laminate is not wood nor is it a floor- it is a floor cover

Laminate and Engineered floor covers are filling our landfills. Over the next 4-5 years, deposits into landfills will double from current levels of 300,000,000 lb. per year. Laminate & Engineered, add in LVT too, are a leased floor covers which rot forever on public lands? LVT, laminate and engineered floors are not green, they are not even biodegradable. Environmentalist scream about deforestation, but what is “greener” than One House, One Floor.

Have your floors reclaimed instead of landfilled

If we put the entire carbon footprint of Southern Pine flooring into the carbon footprint single use floor covers, and their chemicals products it would be like putting a BB into a boxcar.

17 Feb

Why use VOCs?

Misconceptions, Misdirections and Misinformation

Why Are VOCs Still Used?

What a great question? The answer is that very few of us know they exist in almost everything manufactured for mass merchandising. Volatile Organic Chemicals (VOCs) can be used to produce products and created as biproducts. VOC’s can be harmless; they can be dangerous but the majority of just the “unknown” as is not enough information to make a determination. Paint, wood-finishing products, lacquers, hydraulic fluids, petroleum fuels, adhesives, pesticides, cleaning supplies, building materials, furniture, and electronic equipment such as printers all contain VOC’s.

The footprint of fake wood

If you listen to most “enviromental” warriors, logging and timber is the equivilent of fossil fuels when accessing a carbon footprint. This is ridiculous. Managed timber doesn’t lend itself to wildfires and real wood doesn’t end up in the landfill. If every house only had one floor over its lifetime, how many tear out and installations would that save, the house? Real wood floors will outlive your house. In fact, one day they will be reclaimed or salvaged as they are reinvented a century later. Try that with laminate.

Real is good

Wide plank solid real wood floor finished tinted oils

'Pure' on CHP

Caribbean heart pine with monocoat pure finish — Moncoat "Pure"

Do not blame others

The manufacturing process no longer occurs in the United States and there is no possible way to regulate the number of vendors sending VOCs into the U.S. However, do not blame the countries doing the manufacturing because they are not the sellers! Consumers depend on the manufacturers to protect their health, first and foremost. Unfortunately, a large majority of retailers continue to use VOCs despite their harmful effects. Why do they continue to use VOCs? Demand for cheap goods always gets the blame, and while it plays a part; that demand was created by the cheap manufacturing processes not vice versa.

Salvaged pine decking using skins 1/2 thick

25 Mar

Harmful chemicals or VOC’s

Finish and Install

20 Mar

One house one floor

Customer Bill of Rights

One House should have one floor

Real wood, solid 3/4 flooring sits at the core of Southern Yellow Pine Directs ‘One House One Floor’ philosophy. No repeat customers unless you move or add. How? Simple, we do not lease you a floor cover we sell you a floor. Refinish and create a new one every ten years rather than leasing another future landfill cover .

If it is only one floor, it has to be real.

Our philosophy, One House, One Floor has at its core one absolute; there is never a reason to buy engineered floors unless you are a prison, state university or hospital. Second, laminate and vinyl are future ground poison unless you have tested all the myriad of chemicals used during production.

The solution involves battling a very powerful lobby, an industry literally dependent on these products and installers who cannot nail down real wood. However, remember Mr. Adam Smith? “Vote with your wallets” and decide the winner in free markets, it is the only answer. As consumers, we must demand One house, One Floor! No more repeat business. Imagine what we can do with that $10,000 we save every 7 years! Stop giving away our equity, retrain the public from a grass roots approach.

Beams - we use every piece except the nails

The economics of repeat business

Economics 101 under Dr. Don Diffine, great teacher, he would “argue” you to the right answer. His dry sense of humor and willingness to argue kept my attention. In this setting came my introduction to Adam Smith and the “the invisible hand” operating withing markets. The invisible hand tells us that money will follow the path of least resistance, i.e. it has no conscience. Flash to present day and you can find a salesperson who will tell you to “tear out real wood” to put in LVT In the decade that gave us Wall Street and “greed is good”, Adam Smith helped me understand what this meant.

When did one house one floor stop being a thing?

In 1992 Ross Perot warned of a “giant sucking sound” of jobs leaving. We can argue that point, but we certainly saw a giant sucking of American wealth. Cheap products, planned obsolescence on steroids with the mantra, “ it is just cheaper to buy a new one.” Real wood floors disappeared, along with “one house one floor” and the Maytag man. Now before you think we are pining (pun intended) for the past, not even close. Investment flooring, our promise, has at the core a very simple premise, One House One Floor. In the real world that means our floors will outlive the house, reclaimed and sold again for 10 times the price, i.e. an investment.

One house one floor, no kidding

Financial Crisis, only slower

Remember the last big transfer of homeowner equity? The financial crisis stripped homeowners of any equity, leaving many upsides down for good. The Flooring industry is more subtle, slowing robbing the equity on leased floors every 5-7 years. OK, can we assume, every we replace covers every 7 years? Too frequent? Make it every 10 years- or 14 times if the home reaches 140 years. How much does it cost to tear out the last one to put in the next leased cover, is $10,000 fair? More than, right? 14 x 10,000 is $140,000 for this house, what about the subdivision, the city, the state and nation? Do the math, you will need a special calculator for large numbers before you leave the subdivision. Please, One House One Floor.

Reclaim one day

Unlimited uses

Antique heart pine used for bathroom counter

Real is better than fake

Installing a real wood floor begins with pre conditioning

05 Dec

Real Wood Floors

Customer Bill of Rights, Misconceptions, Misdirections and Misinformation, Wood Floor Shopping

04 Jun

Monocoat wood floor finishes

Our favorite Finishes, Finish and Install

01 May

Laminate and Engineered

Misconceptions, Misdirections and Misinformation

What is a VOC?

Volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, are gases that are emitted into the air from products or processes. Some are harmful by themselves, including some that cause cancer. In addition, they can react with other gases and form other air pollutants after they are in the air. Furthermore, because it contains toxic VOCs like formaldehyde and takes decades to disperse, laminate is a health risk long after replaced.

Laminate and single use floors

These compounds continue to produce VOCs after they are in your home. Formaldehyde was found in a major retailer laminate a few years ago. Sixty Minutes did a shocking story, they promised to do better. However, the main manufacturers of this material are in China and Vietnam. Standards, for end products shipped back to the U.S. are nonexistent. For more about this issue contact us today. The carbon footprint of these products dwarfs that of sustainable forest producing the only true eco-friendly floor besides dirt.

Engineered for profit not health

When it comes to sustainability, one of the first issues with wood laminate is the large carbon footprint. It requires a lot of fossil fuel energy to power the required pressure and heat used in the manufacturing process. And more often than not, production occurs in China, that is problematic on a few levels, including VOC regulations.

Wear layers are shrinking

Engineered flooring was an innovation, that actually increased the yield of domestic mills. Early engineered floors had wear layers of ½ or 9 ⅙ of solid wood with small layers of other materials designed to replace sub-floor. In those days we did not have the adhesive we have today, so this was a great innovation; however, the intent was for a few situations, never for the mass market. The problem is that manufacturers came up with some innovative marketing while taking the wear layers down to 2mm, from 1/2 inch.

SYP Direct the Homeowners Advocate

If you are confused or just sick of all the nonsense you hear about laminate and engineered floors, please give us a call. SYP Direct believes in ‘One House, One Floor’, no repeat customers unless they move or add on. We sell the type of floors someone reclaim one day, not the type that sits in landfills. We are the homeowners advocate and their resource for the truth about wood flooring, fake and real.

Laminate and Engineered floors are just a lease

Laminate and engineered floors are a single use cover, which is exactly like a lease you’re going to pay a certain amount for it, and then it’s going to end up in a landfill. Real wood is the only green choice. A real Wood floor remains functional for 140 years. How many single use covers revolved during that time period? How much homeowner equity turned into profits for shareholders by tricking us into thinking compressed garbage and plastic is better than real wood.

The industry

Lifetime transferable waterproof, not resistant but proof, come on! We have some “luxury vinyl” cost more than our prefinished 7” solid wide plank Heart Pine. No kidding- how upside down is that? But wait, they have a magic warranty. One which can be transferred as if it had any value whatsoever. They claim pine is not durable. Independence Hall still looks good, as do the 3500 Duck camps with pine floors across the marsh (guesstimate). They tell you it cannot be glued or is too expensive, the list is based on their lack of source and motivation to sell unfinished (low margin) flooring.

Arbitrage is the simultaneous purchase and sale of an asset to profit from an imbalance in the price. It is a trade that profits by exploiting the price differences of identical or similar financial instruments (raw materials) on different markets or in different forms. Timber ships to Vietnam, back as a photocopy of wood floor plus some slivers. Presto, the trees “retail” value goes up 100 times, 1000 times? Nobody really knows, like that owl licking the tootsie roll pop.

Load More Posts

green

Searching the internet provides ads in disguise

Solid versus engineered

Stop listening to them

Baseball, Apple Pie and Southern Pine

Box Store Pine Floors

Dog Friendly

How long does acclimation take?

The eco-friendly floor

Plant a tree

Sustainable timber means green

Sustainable timber create floors that last forever

No clear cutting

Failing to clear dead trees causes wildfires

Laminate is not wood- what is it?

Laminate is not wood imported it is re-imported

Have your floors reclaimed instead of landfilled

Why Are VOCs Still Used?

The footprint of fake wood

Real is good

'Pure' on CHP

Why Are VOCs Still Used?

What are volatile organic chemicals?

Environmental Impact LVT and Laminate

Real wood is Green

Monocoat by Rubio

One House should have one floor

Beams - we use every piece except the nails

One house one floor, no kidding

Reclaim one day

Unlimited uses

Real is better than fake

Understanding Solid Wood Floors

Buying solid wood usually means a site finish

Sanding unfinished solid wood floors

Mill to order makes install easy

Stop leasing temporary floor covers

Advertising by box stores

Angie’s List wrong on flooring

Buying Real Wood Flooring

Investment Approach to Flooring

Invest in Solid Wood Floors

Monocoat one of best Southern Pine flooring finishes

Monocoat is definition of Green finish

Plant Based Natural Oils

What is a VOC?

Wear layers are shrinking

Laminate and Engineered floors are just a lease

The industry