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Important facts to note when buying European Oak Flooring
Colour variation of wood flooring
Wood is a natural material and will have variations from board to board and even within the board, not only in the visual features such as grain, knots and growth rings, but more subtlety in the mineral density and fibre density ratio in the exposed wood surface. This natural variation in the wood responds to the process reaction during any subsequent colouring process whereby the speed of the reactions (E.g. fuming reactivity) and/or stain absorption saturation point can give rise to variation in hue and density of the observed colour. The result is a distribution or range of colours and tones around a central median colour. Subtle variation between individual trees and different parts of the same tree can result in different ranges of colour hue and density, and also a difference in the median colour of a board exposed to the same production process. Any batch of flooring will in all probability be constituted from more than one tree. The full run of supplied flooring will not only have a wider distribution of colour hue and density than a limited selection shown in a sample panel, board or swatch, but may have multiple distributions of colour hue and density overlaid on a range of median colours.
Indeed, a sample panel, being a sample will not exhibit the extremes or full range of the variation in the colour. Examples of how this might appear could be:
Placing a board against the sample, the board may appear lighter, darker or have a different hue or density in colour. Two boards placed side by side could have a different median colour.
With a board, the colour may vary (E.g. in the vicinity of a knot)
This is the natural variation as expected from a natural material. The median colour of the sample will reside within the full colour range of the production batch.