• Special techniques can make a hardwood floor look even better.Parquet en bois cir?? image by Bruno Bernier from Fotolia.com
  
  Laying a hardwood floor can be a simple matter of nailing one row of boards after the other until you are finished. Your floor will look good even after this minimal installation, but if you want to take advantage of the wide variety of exotic woods that are available, you can incorporate one or more artistic design patterns into your basic layout. Such design techniques are more labor-intensive, but they'll give your floor a singular character. Complicated designs are not appropriate for every floor, and work best in rooms with complementary design motifs.
  
  

Borders and Inlays

• When you add a border or inlay to your floor, you enter a realm of sometimes complex geometry. While measuring for an inlay, also called a medallion, can be exacting, the actual installation isn't much more complicated than installing the flooring boards themselves. When you install a border, though, you have to plan the flooring layout carefully, because the tongues and grooves of the main flooring will have to be specially prepared to fit around the border. Inlays and borders can be sanded and finished along with the rest of the floor after you have finished the installation.
  
  

Parquet

• A floor composed entirely of parquet can be an impressive sight. The boards that comprise the pattern look as though they were individually laid, but the truth is that parquet flooring comes in tongue and groove tiles that are as easy to install as plank flooring. You can nail or glue the tiles to the subfloor, and it's easy to incorporate a bordered inlay of parquet into a plank flooring installation. You can't sand parquet with a drum sander, however, because you will leave cross-grain scratch marks on some of the boards. Sand a parquet floor instead with a flooring orbital sander.
  
  

Scraping and Distressing

• An old floor has a rich quality that is normally lacking in a new one. As floor boards age, they become rounded and smoothed, and the surfaces become mottled with defects that don't detract from the appearance but instead give it character. You can simulate this effect in a new floor by laying pre-scraped and distressed flooring boards, or you can do your own scraping and distressing. A flooring scraper that you pull works best for scraping the surface, and a fairly heavy chain is a good distressing tool.
  
  

Pickling or Whitewashing

• Pickling and whitewashing are glazing techniques that take the place of staining the wood prior to applying a finishing coat. Rather than penetrating the wood, as stain does, pickling and whitewash compounds remain on the surface. They mask the grain and the natural color of the hardwood with a translucent color coating that you can choose to blend with the room decor. Designers use this technique to brighten an otherwise dark room, or to enhance the colors of a bright one.