Most love the look of hand scraped hardwood flooring. Its rustic appeal wows most flooring consumers and it has long been considered a premium reserved for the well-to-do or those with a seemingly unlimited flooring budget. But times they are a changin’…
Remember when VCR’s were as big as a Cadillac and cost about $1,500.00? That was 1980, and thirty years later you can watch that same video on a $100.00 phone you hold in the palm of your hand. Technology, competition and ongoing education has taught us to make things faster, better and more efficiently. Flooring is no different in this regard.
Of course, natural material costs are a factor, but the fact is that there are more trees in this country today than there were fifty years ago. Reforestation efforts have rejuvenated our wood resource and because we’re much smarter than we used to be, we’re much better at protecting the environment. Well, at least the more reputable manufacturers are.
With an abundance of source materials and better technology, floors are produced more quickly, and unbelievably, you can now buy a hand scraped hardwood floor for about half of what it cost twenty years ago. Not only that, you can probably install it yourself.
The other factor that drives the price down of these floors is the internet. More and more the traditional flooring store is going out of business as people realize they can just as easily buy flooring on the internet. It might require a little more work, but the sacings can be well worth it. You might incur a cost to have the flooring shipped to your home, but more often than not, the savings will still be substantial.
And the good news is that it won’t cost any more to have a handscraped hardwood floor to your home than it would be a regular hardwood floor, so you’ll only pay a little extra for the additional work that goes into creating the hand finish.
You’ll still pay more for hand scraped wood flooring than you would a floor with a traditional surface style, but the fact is all wood flooring costs a little less than it used to. It wasn’t too long ago when we had to rely on retail flooring stores and professional flooring installers, but now we can have hand scraped wood flooring shipped to our home and just install it ourselves.
As I said, it’s a little extra work, but is saving thousands worth it? Yes, it really is.