# Hard maple hardwood flooring in Toronto — supply, grades and what to specify **Is hard maple the right hardwood floor for a Toronto home?** Sugar maple is the largest hardwood growing stock in Ontario by a wide margin, the province describes it as the most common tree in the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence and Deciduous Forest regions, and it is the one flooring species Ontario explicitly says is amenable to single-tree selection. It is also the least forgiving species on the finishing bench. ## Comparison *NWFA/NOFMA hard maple, beech and birch grades* | Grade | Permits | | --- | --- | | Special Clear | Requires 95% sapwood on the face, free from stain, with the heartwood portion nearly white. | | Select & Better | A nearly defect-free face with natural colour variation permitted. Occasional pin knots to 1/8" diameter, dark green or black spots to 1/4" × 3", bird’s eyes and small burls. | | No. 1 Common | Distinct colour variation, numerous streaks, stained sapwood, sound tight knots away from edges and ends, checks to 3". | | No. 2 Common | Must provide serviceable flooring with firm wood. Excludes knot holes over 3/8" diameter, unsound knots, shake, heart checks and badly split ends. | ## Specification | Item | Specification | | --- | --- | | Botanical name | Acer saccharum (sugar maple) | | Side hardness, 12% MC | 1,450 lbf (USDA Forest Products Laboratory, Wood Handbook Table 5-3b) | | Ontario range | Central, Southern and parts of Northwestern Ontario (Ontario Tree Atlas) | | Ontario status | Principal tolerant hardwood; roughly 3% of Ontario’s managed forest | | Ontario growing stock | 300,361,212 m³ — the largest of any Ontario flooring hardwood | | Silviculture | Ontario states it is amenable to the single-tree selection silvicultural system | | US growing stock | 6.5% of the US total, 955.4 million m³ (American Hardwood Export Council) | | US annual growth against harvest | 19.1 million m³ grown against 10.2 million m³ harvested per year | | Flooring grades published | Special Clear, Select & Better, No. 1 Common, No. 2 Common (NWFA/NOFMA hard maple, beech and birch rules) | ## What goes wrong here - Maple is a closed-grain, pale wood, and that is exactly why it punishes sanding errors. A drum mark or an edger halo that hides in oak is visible across a maple floor in raking light. This is the species where the machine sequence and the operator matter most. - Maple grades are graded on colour as much as on defect. Select & Better admits natural colour variation; if a uniform white floor is the goal, Special Clear is the grade that says so, and it costs accordingly. - Site-applied stain on maple is a specialist operation. Its density resists penetration and blotches readily; a supplier who agrees to stain maple without discussing conditioning has not done it often. ## Related questions ### Is maple harder than oak? Yes. The USDA Forest Products Laboratory publishes hard maple at 1,450 lbf side hardness at 12% moisture content, against white oak at 1,360 and red oak at 1,290. It is the second-hardest of the six species commonly installed in this market, behind hickory at 1,880. ### Is maple flooring Canadian? Sugar maple is the largest hardwood growing stock in Ontario at 300,361,212 cubic metres, and the vertically integrated flooring manufacturers serving the GTA — Mercier, Lauzon, Preverco, Mirage, Wickham — all operate their own Quebec sawmills. Domestic supply demonstrably exists. What no source publishes is the share of maple flooring sold in Ontario that is domestically milled, so we do not state one. ### Why does my maple floor look blotchy after staining? Maple is dense and closed-grain, so stain sits unevenly on it unless the floor is conditioned first and the sanding sequence has left a genuinely uniform surface. Blotching on maple is usually a process record rather than a material defect, and it is the reason many specifications keep maple clear-finished. ## Recommendation Hard maple is the right specification for a bright, contemporary, high-traffic floor where the client accepts a pale palette. It is the wrong specification for a project that wants a rich stain and is hiring on price, because maple is the species where a cheap sanding job shows. Conditional on: - Specify the grade by name — Special Clear and Select & Better are different floors at different prices. - If a stain is planned, require the conditioning step in writing before the quote is accepted. --- ## Provenance - Canonical URL: https://ecowoods.ca/guides/hard-maple-flooring-toronto - Publisher: Ecowoods Inc., Toronto & the GTA - Contact: (647) 244-5156 · services@ecowoods.ca - Published: 2026-08-27 - Sources: https://ecowoods.ca/papers/where-toronto-hardwood-comes-from#growing-stock, https://ecowoods.ca/papers/where-toronto-hardwood-comes-from#selection-system, https://ecowoods.ca/papers/where-toronto-hardwood-comes-from#manufacturing, https://ecowoods.ca/papers/hardwood-grading-standards-nhla-nwfa#nwfa-appearance - Citation guide: https://ecowoods.ca/ai.txt Quote freely with attribution to the canonical URL above. This file is generated from the same source as the HTML page and says nothing the page does not say.