How Long Does a Wood Floor Need to Cure?

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Tim Gipson and I'm going to talk to you about how long a wood floor needs to cure. Now when wooden floor is manufactured, the wood is actually kiln, dried to about a seven percent moisture content and then it is machined. However, in the process of processing, packaging it, distributing it, warehousing it, then those properties can change. The wood with that type of a moisture content; if it's in higher moisture areas which most places tend to be; a higher moisture area, they will actually absorb that. So essentially what wood does is that it will expand and contract based on the temperature and based on the moisture that it is exposed to. So whenever you are purchasing wood, it's very important that you bring it in to the space that it's going to be installed in and you let it acclimate. Now if you use a natural wood products that it's been warehoused or it's been in a unspecified or maybe not necessarily climate controlled environment, it could take as much as a month to, for that wood to acclimate or cure to the ambient moisture and temperature in the room where it's going to be installed. And also, at times it's recommended that this is usually stacked where you would stack it and put a one inch by one inch separator between the wood pieces, every sixteen to eighteen inches along that stack and allow the air and the moisture in them space to pass through that. Typically if you bring the natural wood floor or even processed wood floor such as the pre-finished and plywood versions, typically, if you bring those in the space, open those packages up and allow it to sit for a couple of weeks; in most case you will be safe to go ahead and install it. If you do not let a wood floor acclimate to the space before you install it; particularly in a glue down or a nail down situation as it expands, if it has no place to expand and it doesn't and it does it to a great degree, you can actually get pops or separations in the wood flooring and that is something that we don't want to have. So again, whenever you're preparing to put down a wood floor, you want to make sure that you bring that wood floor, open those cartons as it come in and allow it to acclimate or cure to the ambient; the temperature and moisture content in your room prior to installing it and at least two weeks as advisable, more if you can possibly allow it. Now if you want to speed that up, you could also have a fun that is circulating the air throughout the room and allows it to distribute that more evenly to the wood flooring. So I'm Tim Gipson with how long to cure a wood floor."