Letting Wood Floors Acclimate to Your Home

While you may have heard of letting a fish acclimate to its new tank temperature, or of letting yourself get acclimated to a new job, you might not be familiar with this concept in terms of hardwood flooring. After all, what would prefinished hardwood flooring even need to acclimate to—foot traffic? Isn’t it common knowledge that all hardwoods are supremely resistant to that?

While your hardwood flooring won’t need time to acclimate to your family or pets, there is one key factor that you must be aware of when it comes to letting your hardwoods adjust to your home. E Hardwoods & Flooring, where you can buy hardwood flooring online, will explain further below.

Humidity: Not Necessarily Hardwood’s Best Friend

Humidity, as you may or may not know, is defined as the concentration of water vapor in the air. If you’ve walked outside on a muggy summer’s day and felt like you were melting, even though the temperature was only in the 70’s, you’ve experienced the effects of high humidity. The air in this situation is highly saturated with water vapor, which means that your sweat had trouble evaporating and cooling you.

This might be a fun science lesson, but what does it have to do with your hardwoods? Quite a bit, actually. The unique humidity level of your household or business is the biggest thing that all wood floors, whether they are engineered hardwood flooring or prefinished solid hardwood flooring, will need to acclimate to before installation. Due to their sensitivity to moisture, you risk your brand new flooring warping if it’s not allowed to adjust itself.

How, you may ask, does one acclimate their hardwood floors to the surrounding humidity?

• Bring all boxes of wood inside and open them up | Put them in the room you plan to install the flooring in. This also gives you the opportunity to check for damaged products and to get a good look at what your brand new floors will look like.
• Make sure all boxes are on a flat surface | You don’t want your hardwood to warp before you even put it down.
• Let the wood stand for at least five days | Yes, that’s it. Just leave it there, and the flooring will adjust on its own. However, be aware that in certain climate types, hardwood might require a little more time to adjust to the environment.

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