Fabulous Timber Floors Inspiration

I love the look and feel of homes with polished timber flooring and would choose this over carpet any day.

So, its with little surprise our first adventure on the renovation for our new apartment is replacing the (hideous) carpet with some glorious polished floorboards.

With no idea what we wanted, outside of polished floorboards, we definitely learnt a lot this weekend!

We had the choice of several types of Australian timber flooring including Blackbutt, Spotted Gum, Tasmanian Oak and Jarrah. The international options included American Oak, Northern Box, Merbau, Southern Box, Kentucky and Hevea. Each wood has a different Janka rating, a measure of the resistance of the wood to indentation. The toughest options were Blackbutt and Spotted Gum.

The alternative to timber flooring we discovered, is Bamboo. I never had considered Bamboo as an option for flooring, but with it being a sustainable resource its definitely an attractive option.

Decisions, decisions! We momentarily decided to go ahead with the Bamboo flooring but, made the last minute decision to go with timber flooring instead. The type? Spotted Gum - a gorgeous timber with loads of character, with an almost ashy look.

It was important to ensure we had a durable floor that was going to last for many years to come and wasn't going to date. The Bamboo was beautiful, but didn't have the gorgeous natural wood-grain that the Spotted Gum has; below is a comparision of the two:

{Bamboo}

 {Spotted Gum}

So very exciting, the first thing for our apartment is organised! We are getting it installed before we move (not for 4 weeks) but I will be posting pics once it's in.

All images from this post were sourced from photographer James Merrell's portfolio.