A lot of customers ask me, “Why is hardwood flooring so expensive?”
Hardwood flooring expensive for five different reasons:
Hardwood trees are diminishing.
It is very labor intensive to install and finish.
Technology has had little impact on the hardwood flooring process.
Lumber costs have increased.
Many alternatives to hardwood that change perspective.
Hardwood trees are diminishing
The demand for hardwood products has been rising at about twice the rate of new hardwood growth. An old wives’ tale says that a “squirrel could go from the Atlantic to The Mississippi without touching the ground.” Whether this is factual or not, it is well known that we have harvested almost all of the old growth trees. I spent 1 year of my life logging hardwoods in the forests of Michigan. The majority of the trees we cut down were less than 50 years old. That’s because we already hacked down the truly old trees. As logging technology has improved, the way we pillaged the forests increased drastically until into the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s when the hippie movements began to show some light on the damage being done.
Since then, we have heavily regulated the cutting down of timber, particularly clear cutting. (the practice of cutting down all the trees in one area) This goes for all public lands in the USA. Private land is still fair game.
Cutting down all of the old growth timber has made it to where there are far less large trees. This means less hardwood over all. This has resulted in major increases in prices for all hardwood products. The cost of hardwood flooring has increased drastically since the year 2000. You can expect to pay a minimum of 3.50 a sq. ft. for the most basic Red Oak flooring.
A labor-intensive process & Technologies lack of improvement
The way we put in hardwood flooring in 1990 vs. the way it goes in today is not that much different. We put down a vapor barrier of some sort, (liquid, tar paper or Aqua Bar B) lay the floor out and then nail it in with a pneumatic nailer. With the wider plank flooring we will glue & nail. The installation process has gotten much more advanced with moisture barriers, special glues that stretch and rolling nail guns but the actual time it takes now vs 1990 is only slightly faster.
Let’s talk about the sand and finish process now. Once the floor is installed, it’s time to sand it down. We start with a belt or drum sander and an edger. Many of us still use machines from the 90’s and earlier. That’s because these machines are not much different. They have been very hard to improve on over time. It’s hard to speed up your process when the new machines are not much better than the old ones. The only thing that has changed about belt sanders and drum sanders is their ability to suck up dust. The amount of dust left in a house today vs. in the past is drastically different.
Once you sand a floor down to where it’s flat and smooth, it’s time to finish the floor with a buffer or a planetary sander. The majority of companies still use a simple floor buffer to finish sanding with. A large amount of companies have switched over to “planetary sanders.” These sanders sand with multiple heads moving in different directions. This allows for a slightly faster finishing process. The main difference though is in the quality. These planetary sander machines are not that much faster, but they make the floor much flatter and allow for much more even finishing.
Whether you put penetrating oil, stain and oil base finish or just some clear coats, the process is not much different than before. The majority of companies stain floors on their hands and knees working long ways down the rows of wood in the floor. Applying finish, they still use the same T-bars they did 30 years ago.
As you can see the hardwood business is one that requires extreme attention to detail. You can’t miss anything. You must sand every single square inch of the floor with each grit in your sequence. You can’t miss spots. All the corners must be hand-scraped using the same scrapers from 1970. Even though we have a million different corner sanding machines, nothing has been able to outpace a determined man with a scraper and file.
While it may seem to you as though hardwood flooring rates have gone way up, this is simply not true for the labor part of the process. If you ask any floor guy who has been in business for 30 years, he will tell you that the cost of wood as gone up considerably, but the cost of labor to install, sand and finish has only gone up a very minor amount.
Increasing lumber costs
Lumber costs have been rising for particularly over the last 10 years. This has been the result of many things.
Forest fires have been the worse they have ever been since we started keeping track. The last ten years has ravished many forests across the western United States as well as some northern states in the Midwest such as Minnesota. The fires have not only been in the USA though. Canada, Brazil and Australia (just to name a few) have also been ravished by forest fires. These fires cause a decrease in lumber supply resulting in an increase in lumber costs.
While much of the forests that have burned have been soft woods, it has still put a hurt on hardwood prices. But it’s not just fires.
If you were to go on a hike through any Midwestern state park, you will see a large amount of dead and dying trees that looked like they just died for no reason. The Ash Bore beetle is a parasite that has come from over seas and killed a majority of the Ash trees in North America. It is estimated that in a few years, they will be completely gone. Prior to this parasite, ash was one of the most prevalent species of trees to be found in hardwood forests.
The process to log hardwoods is also a process that has been changed very little by new machines. Most hardwood logging companies run chainsaws, skidders and log loaders. They don’t have the cool machines you may see on YouTube, that cut down the tree, hack all the branches and load it into a bunk. Those machines are for soft woods like pine. They are used in the production of pulp for paper, cardboard, lumber for framing etc.
The majority of raw hardwood flooring that is installed in the USA, is also milled in the USA. Most of the wood I install in Southwest Michigan, is milled in Wisconsin, Michigan or Indiana. It does not make sense to export it to be milled due to the cost of transportation to and from China. If we have learned anything over the past few decades, it’s that making things in America is expensive. Having USA mills make the flooring is not cheap.
Another large factor for increase in hardwood product cost is China. As they have become the second largest player in the world economy over the last 20 years, they have begun importing huge amounts of our hardwoods. A massive amount of these go into making veneers for cheap furniture produced in China’s low quality furniture industry. China also has begun consuming these products themselves. While many people in China still live very poor and don’t have much, lots of Chinese citizens can now afford to purchase products that contain these hardwoods exported from the USA, Canada and Other countries.
A perspective issue
In 1920, you could have hardwood in your home or you could have softwood in your home. One way or another you were going to use wood. It wasn’t a specialty flooring back then like it is today. It was the only common form of flooring. Tile was not common in the average home at this point in time and carpet was still 40 years out. I don’t know what the prices on hardwood were like in 1920, but I doubt they seemed expensive, simply because they were all you had.
Now we have laminates for sale for $.49 a square foot. They are made out of synthetic products that don’t have any wood in them at all. The improvements we have had in technology have allowed us to come up with flooring options that are considerably cheaper than back in 1920. A man doesn’t have cut the tree down, drag it, chop it up and truck it to the mill for processing. It’s just a matter of materials coming on rail cars and freight trucks and being processed into what looks like wood. These cheap products are what makes wood seem so expensive.
Wood may seem very expensive, however it’s hard to beat a product that will last 100 years in your home. Most wood floors out live the people who live on them. If we focus on the cost, we miss the point. If we focus on the value, it all makes sense.
-This is a guest post from David Kelly, Owner of Lumberjack Flooring Company in Southwest, MI. The opinions and content of this post do not necessarily reflect that of Woodwise Boulder.