What type of hardwood floors do I have?
Homebuyers often inherit hardwood floors from previous owners who do not know the specific wood type. Not knowing the wood makes it difficult to properly care for the floor or set the house humidifier correctly for dry climates. It also leaves you guessing whether the existing floor is glued down or easy to pull up to install laminate.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
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What type of hardwood floors do I have?
- 1Asking online forums to identify the wood type from photosDid this help you?
- 2Posting photos on internet forums to ask others to identify the material and installation methodDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Want to lay down laminate when we move in, not sure what this type of flooring is, wondering if it’s usually glued down or easy to tear up”source ↗
“And is it easy to get up to put laminate down, or is it usually glued down?”source ↗
“We are buying a house and the current owners say they do not know what type of hardwood it is. We are hoping to learn and be able to properly care for it and have the house humidifier settings properly set for the wood as we live in a dry climate.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 2How to tell what kind of wood is under carpeted stairs
- 2What are these strips around the edges of my floor?
- 2Is this flooring engineered hardwood, laminate, or LVP?
- 3How to tell if wood floors in different rooms match
- 5Do I need to take engineered hardwood out of the box to acclimate?
- 6How to match vinyl flooring to existing wood