Engineered Vs Solid Hardwood Flooring - Facts & Misconceptions

Many people are under the feeling that solid hard wood flooring is superior to be able to engineered hardwood flooring and may perhaps refuse to consider built flooring for their own home. Having invested 25 years like a flooring contractor and the past 4 many years as a merchant of both manufactured and solid wood flooring, I have got found that there are lots of beliefs about both varieties of floors. I would like to share the following information and my experience so that you can easily make an well-informed decision about the particular best floor for your project.

Before I begin my personal comparison of designed and solid floors, let us first of all get rid of the belief that engineered flooring is the similar as laminate floor coverings (ie-Pergo. ) Additional than a several people enter my showroom using this concept, which is not necessarily true. Laminate floors is not actual wood, engineered floors is. The surface area layer of laminate floors are a photograph of wood materials on paper impregnated with melamine, not really real wood. The top layer (also referred to as wear layer) regarding engineered wood floor coverings consists of (real! ) high-quality wooden. Engineered hardwood floors are comprised associated with multiple layers regarding wood, which can be cross-banded for stability and glued onto the plywood base.

Solid Flooring: Plus

Sound wood floor is exactly that--a solid piece of wood from leading to bottom. The thickness can fluctuate, typically ranges from 3/4" to 5/16". Solid hardwood is usually certainly hardwearing plus resilient, and its major advantage is that it can be re-sanded many times. However, it is usually not necessarily exceptional to engineered floor in this admiration. Solid wood flooring, like engineered flooring, has a "wear layer" or level of wood of which can be sanded, and it is only a cheaper width of the floor. Even though strong floors are heavier than the wear part of engineered floor surfaces, you could only sand down so much before you would hit a nail with solid floor coverings. You may have one, possibly several, additional sandings using a solid ground compared to a good engineered floor. This is the just possible advantage to solid flooring, for me, and it will not apply in every case and generally does not offset the advantages of engineered floor.

Engineered Flooring: Pro's

Engineered floors need several advantages. Although solid floors usually are not a good choice in situations where right now there are high wetness levels or radiant heat systems, the particular construction of designed floors makes all of them stable enough to be able to withstand certain modifications in temperature and even moisture that may come up with a solid floor warp.  Check out the post right here  are designed to resist wood's all-natural tendency to modify dimensionally over time. The grain of every layer runs in opposite directions, which often makes engineered floors very stable. Because of this the wood will expand and contract less than stable wood flooring in the course of fluctuations in dampness and temperature. With regard to this reason manufactured floors are the better choice regarding applications for instance more than radiant heat installations, in kitchens, bath rooms, and basements, or perhaps where a floor is needed to span two differing sub-floors like plywood and concrete.

Another advantage of engineered floors is a lot more flexibility of set up types. Whereas solid floors can just be nailed lower, most engineered floor surfaces can be nailed or stapled to some wood sub ground, or glued down to a solid wood sub floor or perhaps concrete slab. Only engineered floors may be floated, the just option when hard wood flooring cannot end up being attached to the sub-floor.

Lastly, when compared with solid wood flooring, engineered flooring is a more ecologically sustainable choice, as it can yield up in order to four times typically the amount of flooring using the similar amount of good quality wood.

Having said all of this particular, wood floors are certainly a fine choice for many software. They just usually are not necessarily the superior choice in most case, as a lot of people believe. When in doubt, a flooring contractor can evaluate your web site issues and give you advice as to the best flooring type with regard to your home.