Building a Home Dance Studio: Things to Consider
When you first bring your at-home dance studio together, you’ll want your space to marry your preferred dance style with your safety needs. In addition to being sprung, your flooring of choice needs to be slip-resistant while also allowing for your preferred maneuverability. For example, ballet dancers who spend a significant amount of time on pointe benefit from floors that support their joints while offering them a sense of stability and security. On the other hand, tap dancers benefit from working on floors that combine durability with acoustics. If you’re doing a significant amount of contemporary work, you’ll want a floor that is both smooth on your bare feet, and forgiving as you leap, bend, and experiment with floor work.Available Flooring
When it comes to choosing the best flooring for a home dance studio, you have a lot of options. Some of the best flooring options for home dance studios include :Laminate Flooring
Many people look to laminate flooring because this material tends to come in a wide variety of forms, meaning that you can match it to your paint, walls, and other studio accessories with ease. It gives the look of wood at a cheaper price point than hardwood. Installed properly, with a sprung subfloor underneath for safety, laminate flooring can provide a surface that easily matches the rest of your home or studio. However, laminate surfaces are more slippery than is safe for most styles of dance. This surface would be okay only for contemporary dancers who are dancing in bare feet, which gives them lots of grip and stability.Hardwood Flooring
When you imagine a home dance studio, you may first imagine hardwood floors. Hardwood floors tend to be your most expensive installation option, but they’re popular with homeowners who are looking to precisely match the look of the rest of the flooring in their home. Hardwood flooring also tends to withstand significant wear and tear with ease, making it ideal for all forms of dance from ballet to tap. You will need to do some preliminary work if you want your hardwood floors to suit your studio. First you will need to install the sprung subfloor which is necessary for a safe dance practice space. After your sprung subfloor is installed you will need to have a professional install and finish your hardwood dance surface. However, there are some dance floors that give you the quality of hardwood, with the versatility of a subfloor and finish floor in one. They may not match your house perfectly, but they will give you the beauty and durability you want. Some of the best all-in-one hardwood floors for at-home dance studios include:- ProLine Maple
- Soft Shoe Ash
Vinyl Flooring
soft vinyl floors that are rolled out and taped down are both common and suitable for at-home dance studios. However, like hardwood dance floors, it is very important that your vinyl dance floor surface has a sprung subfloor. Vinyl dance floor surfaces are excellent for ballet and contemporary dance. Because they dampen sound, tap acoustics are not as crisp, but they can be very nice for tap dancers who prefer a quieter sound in the home. Like hardwood dance floors, vinyl floors tend to be more complex to install than a dance floor which is both a sprung subfloor and finish floor in onePlywood Flooring
Most dance floors are made with plywood, however what most people do not know is that there are many different types of plywood. There are also plywood-like manufactured wood boards which are sometimes confused with plywood. The quality of plywood board can vary considerably and the type you choose has everything to do with how resilient and durable your floor will be. There are so many types of manufactured wood boards that we will go into only a few here. Several types of board that are commonly called plywood but are not include oriented strand board (typically referred to as OSB), particle board, and medium-density fiberboard (usually called MDF). All of these are made with varying sizes of wood chips or dust which are mixed with adhesive and compressed to make a solid panel. These compressed wood products are less resilient and less durable than plywood. Plywood is made with very thin sheets of wood, called veneers, which are glued together in layers. In each layer, the grain is run in alternated directions to make a more stable board. Plywood can vary in number of layers, quality of veneer, and type of wood. The most high-quality plywood is utilized in interior architectural and marine applications. This high-grade cannot be purchased from your local hardware store. The highest quality plywood dance floors you can buy are both a subfloor and finish floor in one. These include:- ProLine Maple
- Soft Shoe Ash
- Finished Birch