What’s new
Everything newly published here, dated and newest first. This carries our own releases rather than a digest of the trade press — a site that republishes other people’s news is a secondary source competing with its own inputs.
A visual library — 136 images, indexed and linked
Every diagram and photograph on this site in one place: 28 technical cross-sections, each a link to the page that explains it, plus the twelve floors and twelve machines. The photographs rotate with a staggered Ken Burns push in four alternating variants, paused while off-screen. The diagrams do not move — a frame scaling under a cross-section makes it harder to read, not more alive.
28 technical diagrams across the framework, guides and glossary
Cross-sections of the three substrate assemblies, the four failure modes, the expansion gap, acclimation and the machine sequence. Flat vector, one palette, and no text baked into any image — every label stays in the HTML where a screen reader can read it and a crawler can index it. Each diagram is trimmed to its own content, so it carries its true aspect ratio rather than sitting in an empty 16:9 box.
What moves a hardwood quote — three commodity inputs, live
Forestry, energy and USD/CAD, pulled hourly from the Bank of Canada, with the mechanism behind each and why it is volatile. Published so a price change can be evaluated rather than suspected. A source that cannot be reached shows as missing rather than as the last cached number.
A standards register, with the date we last checked each entry
The external documents this trade answers to — ASTM concrete moisture and floor-preparation methods, NWFA guidelines — each mapped to the framework criteria that depend on it, linked to the issuing body, and stamped with a verification date the build warns about when it goes stale.
Two numbered figures, each with the table it was built from
Indoor relative humidity against the band hardwood needs, and Janka hardness across the five species used across the GTA. Every plotted value is checked against its source paper at build time, so a figure cannot drift from the document it claims to visualise. Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.
The whole corpus is now available as JSON
Every paper with full section text, all 27 framework criteria with their sources, every guide and every glossary term — CORS-open, no key, CC BY 4.0. Generated from the same manifests the pages render from, so it cannot describe a page that does not exist.
A 32-term glossary, one addressable page per term
Acclimation, cupping, crowning, telegraphing, overwood, moisture differential and the rest — each with a canonical definition, DefinedTerm schema, and a link to the paper section it comes from.
The EcoWoods Well-Installed Framework v1.0
Six pillars and 27 binary criteria for judging a hardwood installation, published under CC BY with permanent criterion ids. Written to be used on any contractor in the GTA, including us. The self-assessment scores a quote in the browser and sends nothing anywhere.
Three decision guides and three reference installations
Solid versus engineered, installation method by substrate, and how to evaluate a quote — plus three scenarios specified end to end: condominium over slab, radiant heat main floor, and refinishing an existing floor.
The Craft — the four machines and the order they run in
Belt sander, edger, planetary and buffer: what each one does that the others cannot, and why a skipped step in the sequence is a liability that stays invisible until handover day.
Climate Mastery and The Intelligent Homeowner’s Decision Framework
Why hardwood succeeds or fails in Toronto — moisture, acclimation, substrate and method — and how to choose a floor that performs rather than one that photographs well. Published in full as HTML, not gated.
Outside this site
What we watch, and when we last checked
The bodies and documents this work answers to are tracked separately, with the date each entry was last verified against the issuing body’s own page. Every entry is inside its review interval.