School me on wood flooring.

Mac5005

Mac5005

Well-Known Member
Joined
Oct 19, 2005
Location
Rocky Mount
We are set on removing the carpet in our master bedroom. Area is 230 sq ft.

The sub floor is actual plywood not particle board. So here are my questions:

Solid wood vs engineered vs laminate? Cost/install time/ durability?

I'm looking only at prefinished stuff to keep install and finishing time low and we are doing the work ourselves. I don't mind buying a nailer or the solid wood, I can eventually use it I. The kitchen/utility room/breakfast room when we get to that point.

We have a six month old German shepherd that will be 100lbs when fully grown, so durability is a concern.

Where should we purchase the products from? Lowes/Home Depot/lumber liquidators? Private supplier?

Thanks.
 
If you are installing them yourself, I'd go with a laminate floor as opposed to solid hardwood. Don't get me wrong, I love real hardwood floors, but I just can't usually justify the cost, time and labor of hardwood when you can get a similar look and feel out of laminates. I've been very happy with the laminate floor we bought at Costco. It has pad attached and looks like real wood. I installed it in a day. Buy knee pads!!!!! You will thank me later.
 
Check your local equipment rental place, they should have a flooring nail gun for rent for pretty cheap. If you go real wood I would look at other options besides lowes I've had two different flooring installers say that harder to get to go together than other kinds. I've put down both neither extremely hard to do once you figure it out, wider the planks the faster it goes.
 
we have Bruce pre-finished hardwood and it held up to our 120lb black lab. However, in our previous house, the laminate was much more durable with him but it just didn't feel right for a floor. We really wanted regular hard wood.

Our pre-finished floor in our new house is about $7/ft just for the flooring. I can't really comment on install costs but I would guess about 20-30% of materials would be a good estimate given what I feel it would take to install. Obviously, the more you have, the install cost per ft decreases.
 
laminate is typically going to hold up better than engineered hardwoods, but like rockcity said it doesn't feel right on most floors in my opinion. Both to me, are the same amount of time and difficulty to install.

If you are going to stay a long time and can afford it, spend the money and do real hardwoods I say. I put engineered from lumber liquidators down in the old house, the new house has real hardwoods. Also, how durable a engineered or hardwood depends on the actual type of wood it uses. Keep in mind, engineered floors you probably will never be able to resurface, they claim you can, but you normally can't from what I understand from the flooring guys.
 
OK, I'll put in my .02¢. Solid hardwood is done once. Laminate won't scratch easily, but don't get water on them because it's just a paper picture of wood. Engineered flooring can be refinished if #1 they are a decent quality or #2 the person refinishing them is any good. I install solid prefinish for about $7 complete, and that's quality wood. Look for a company called Somerset.


BTW, I can refinish your engineered floors folks!
 
Thanks everyone. After thorough cost comparisons, most laminates require the better ($1/ft) pre-compressed padding, which pushed the price of all the better quality laminates into the range of engineered hardwood. We had found several thicker laminates that we really liked but didn't make much sense price wise once we found about adding the $1/ ft padding.

What we found and are currently looking into is a stranded bamboo product with a surface harder than oak, prefinished, tongue and groove, nail down for $2.79/ft.

Gotwood can these stranded solid bamboo "hardwoods" be refinished?

Thanks again everyone.
 
Mac5005 said:
Thanks everyone. After thorough cost comparisons, most laminates require the better ($1/ft) pre-compressed padding, which pushed the price of all the better quality laminates into the range of engineered hardwood. We had found several thicker laminates that we really liked but didn't make much sense price wise once we found about adding the $1/ ft padding.

What we found and are currently looking into is a stranded bamboo product with a surface harder than oak, prefinished, tongue and groove, nail down for $2.79/ft.

Gotwood can these stranded solid bamboo "hardwoods" be refinished?

Thanks again everyone.
Click to expand...
They can be refinished. Don't try to nail it down with your standard staple gun though. Use a cleat nail by powernail. Also, you will have better luck drillng and hand finish nailing the beginning and last rows, an air finish nailer usually doesn't have the power to penetrate.
 
Just some useful info re: laminates. There are "nicer" laminate floors that are 13mm, where each plank is an individual "wood" plank instead of image of several. I put this in our living room, w/ a cork underlayment, and we get compliments on it all the time from folks that think it's real wood. They "hollow", tin-like sounds people hate from laminates comes from 2 things,1 is the smooth surface, the otehr is that the substrate itself is typically thin and just laying, not nailed, onto the underlayment. W/ the thick, heavy stuff you don't have this problem b/c it has so much density and weight.
We used cork underlayment, which also cuts down on the acoustic hollowness. Not sure what you mean by pre-pressed underlayment, but we have been very happy w/ ours. Its definitely more expensive total, I think after shipping, underlay etc it was around $5/ft.... there are much better deals to be had if you dig around online and order vs buying locally.

That said, real wood is just so much cooler. Everybody knows this. For us, laminate was just more practical b/c I knew our kids/pets etc would wear out the wood finish quickly. If it's installed really tight, water doesn't get through to the pressed fiber layer. I'm not saying thsi is the better route for you, just wanted to clear those things up.
Basically cheap laminate = suckage, expensive laminate = pretty nice, but yes approaching price of wood.
 
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