Whether you are building a new home or remodeling your current place, we need to talk flooring. It’s easy to quickly get absorbed in all the options, but before the flooring craze sweeps you off your feet, let’s make sure your subflooring is up to par.
What is subflooring? It’s the rough floor that attaches to the floor joist, acting as a base for your finished flooring and can be made from concrete, plywood, or OSB (oriented strand board). Why is subflooring important? If built from the right material, it stands up to water disasters that could occur in both finished and unfinished homes.
While plywood and concrete are both workable options for subflooring, a high-quality, moisture-resistant OSB called AdvanTech is strongly encouraged. Why purchase AdvanTech over something else? Because it is designed with a higher level of strength than traditional subflooring - providing a reliable, solid base.Your subfloors should be able to withstand serious weight from china cabinets and hutches to major appliances. This material’s design provides strength, stiffness, stability and helps prevent bouncing, squeaking, and warping. You will never walk through a room and hear dishes rattling or notice random squeaky spots with AdvanTech. As an overall result, you’ll find your floors are much quieter.
Moisture damaging your floors should always be a concern regardless of whether your home is a new-construction home or not. With AdvanTech, the subfloor boards are engineered with a specialized resin technology to provide an advanced level of moisture resistance to protect your home. Since the resin helps the wood resist water absorption, it ultimately reduces swelling as well.
AdvanTech is also considered more structurally consistent over plywood. If you take a good look at a sheet of plywood, it’s made of layers of larger pieces of wood - making it susceptible to a number of imperfections that could create soft spots. AdvanTech is made up of nearly 50 layers of strand board (which is pretty close to the same thickness as plywood) making it a much heavier product.
Something else really fantastic about AdvanTech is that it’s an environmentally-friendly material. More and more home-builders and homeowners are expressing their desire to include “green” initiatives into their home designs. This works well in conjunction with a number of AdvanTech manufacturers who are using small, rapid-growing trees for their product and using the process waste to fuel their facilities. How’s that for going green?
When putting down that new floor, choose AdvanTech. It’s backed by a limited lifetime warranty that’s transferrable to future homeowners - what a bonus! Even more so, AdvanTech is a trusted material carried by Fisher Lumber. For a product that offers strength and stability to give your floor a smooth finish, AdvanTech is the way to go. Our experienced staff will help answer any questions you have about AdvanTech and other materials you might be considering as well. Call us today at (618) 259-7434 or drop by our warehouse in E. Alton.