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Wood Flooring 101
When thinking about wood flooring for your home, you can choose between solid hardwood, engineered wood, and a laminate floor. Once you have selected a flooring type, you can choose the wood species and color that goes with your décor.
Here’s a short primer on the three flooring options.
Solid Hardwood
Solid hardwood is just as the name implies; solid wood all the way through. It is sawn from wood logs and has no “added ingredients”. You can choose from either unfinished or prefinished flooring.
Most of the floors that we do are solid hardwood. We prefer to use unfinished flooring, allowing our clients maximum flexibility in choosing the perfect color stain and then finishing with 3 coats of oil-based polyurethane for protection and years of durability. Pre-finished floors allow you to walk on them immediately but have limited stain choices and are only available in limited sheens.
Hardwood floors must be nailed to a wooden sub-floor. Unlike other wood flooring options, solid hardwood cannot be installed straight on concrete or on top of your existing flooring.
The primary advantage to hardwood flooring is that it can be re-sanded and finished numerous times over several decades. The biggest disadvantage is that it's not a good product for moist areas such as basements and bathrooms. The majority of hardwood flooring used in the US is grown and processed here, helping keep jobs for Americans, which seems like a plus.
We tend to use solid hardwood flooring in homes that already have it, where we are adding on an adjacent area, or where walls have been removed, and it makes sense to patch in and refinish some or all of the floors so that they look like they have "always been like that". It's the real thing, and tends to be our first choice.
Engineered Wood Flooring
Engineered wood flooring is comprised of a top layer, from 1/16” to 1/8” thick, of wood adhered to a plywood substrate. Because plywood is made up of multiple layers that are cross-layered (running perpendicular to each other), it has dimensional stability, making it less subject to cupping and curling. This makes it more tolerant of occasional moisture than solid hardwood flooring. Both engineered hardwood and prefinished flooring have a factory-baked finish, which may be harder than a custom 3 coat poly finish.
Engineered wood floors offer a variety of installation options. The thinner varieties can be nailed down. The thicker kinds can be installed as floating floors which means no nailing and the option to lay directly over your current floor as long as it is level and stable.
The biggest disadvantage to engineered wood flooring is that thin top layer. While it can be sanded and refinished you will only be able to do so once or twice, depending on the skill of the refinisher.
This flooring is versatile. We use it regularly, with our preference being to use it in locations that won't get a lot of heavy shoe traffic, such as basements and bedrooms. As a bonus, engineered flooring saves our forests, since it only takes 25% of the number of prime trees as solid wood flooring.
Laminate Flooring
A lower priced alternative to real wood; although it looks like wood, laminate flooring is not real wood. It is comprised of a thin top layer of resin infused paper (a photograph of wood) on top of a wood chip composite. Based on the quality of the paper used to replicate wood it can look amazingly realistic. The selection is almost limitless, offering everything from fine mahogany to antique wide plank looks. In the past few years, the "look" of these laminate floors has greatly improved.
Foremost among the advantages is laminate flooring's resistance to scratching and its ability to be used in rooms where it is likely to get water on it, like bathrooms. Like engineered wood flooring, it saves time during construction – and avoids the disruption and expense of a three or four day finishing process. The primary disadvantage is that it cannot be refinished at all, is hard to repair, and some find the surface to be slippery to walk on in stocking feet.
We opted to use laminate flooring for two recent projects, where new finished space was being added to a home; an inlaw suite and a basement playroom. It gave the customer good value for their money, and they were happy with the final end product.
Wrap Up
Each of the floors has an application to which it is well matched.
For the most part, solid hardwood is what our clients elect. It looks "the best", is the traditional New England floor, and has the longest life since it can be refinished repeatedly. Laminate flooring saves time and is a good value. Engineered and prefinished solid hardwood flooring tend to be used for their "convenience factor", although their cost often exceeds that of a solid wood floor with 3 coats of polyurethane.
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