Engineered Vs Solid Hardwood Flooring – Facts & Misconceptions

A lot of shoppers are below the impact that strong hardwood flooring is outstanding to engineered hardwood flooring and may even refuse to contemplate engineered flooring for their residence. Obtaining spent twenty five years as a flooring contractor and the earlier four many years as a retailer of the two engineered and solid hardwood flooring, I have found that there are a whole lot of misconceptions about equally kinds of flooring. I would like to share the adhering to info and my knowledge so that you can make an educated selection about the greatest floor for your task.

Prior to I commence my comparison of engineered and sound floors, enable us first clear up the false impression that engineered flooring is the identical as laminate flooring (ie-Pergo.) A lot more than a number of folks wander into my showroom with this notion, which is not correct. Laminate flooring is not true wood, engineered flooring is. The surface layer of laminate flooring is a photograph of wooden grain on paper impregnated with melamine, not genuine wooden. The best layer (also called wear layer) of engineered wood flooring is composed of (true!) substantial-high quality wood. Engineered hardwood flooring are comprised of several layers of wooden, which are cross-banded for security and glued onto a plywood foundation.

Strong Flooring: Pro’s

Solid wooden ground is just that–a sound piece of wooden from top to bottom. The thickness can vary, but typically ranges from three/4″ to 5/16″. Sound hardwood is certainly hardwearing and resilient, and its main edge is that it can be re-sanded numerous occasions. However, it is not always superior to engineered flooring in this regard. Strong wood flooring, like engineered flooring, has a “put on layer” or layer of wooden that can be sanded, and it is only a fraction of the thickness of the ground. Even although reliable flooring are thicker than the use layer of engineered flooring, you can only sand down so far prior to you would hit a nail with sound flooring. You might get one, probably two, additional sandings with a strong ground in comparison to an engineered floor. This is the only possible edge to solid flooring, in my view, and it does not implement in each scenario and normally does not outweigh the advantages of engineered flooring.

Engineered Flooring: Pro’s

Engineered flooring have numerous advantages. While strong floors are not a good decision in circumstances where there are higher humidity amounts or radiant warmth techniques, the design of engineered floors tends to make them stable sufficient to stand up to specific adjustments in temperature and dampness that may well make a strong ground warp. Engineered hardwood flooring is made to resist wood’s organic tendency to adjust dimensionally more than time. The grain of each and every layer runs in opposite directions, which tends to make engineered floors really stable. This implies that the wooden will grow and agreement less than reliable wooden flooring during fluctuations in humidity and temperature. For polyaspartic coatings for garage are a better selection for purposes these kinds of as over radiant heat installations, in kitchens, bathrooms, and basements, or where a floor is necessary to span two differing sub-flooring like plywood and concrete.

An additional gain of engineered flooring is more overall flexibility of installation types. Whereas solid floors can only be nailed down, most engineered floors can be nailed or stapled to a wooden sub flooring, or glued down to a wood sub ground or concrete slab. Only engineered flooring can be floated, the only choice when hardwood flooring can not be attached to the sub-ground.

And lastly, compared to solid wooden flooring, engineered flooring is a more environmentally sustainable decision, as it can generate up to 4 moments the amount of flooring using the same quantity of high high quality wood.

Having explained all of this, strong wooden floors are surely a fine decision for numerous programs. They just are not automatically the exceptional option in every single circumstance, as several people believe. When in doubt, a flooring contractor can evaluate your web site conditions and suggest you as to the ideal flooring sort for your property.