Engineered Wooden Flooring: Comparing To Other Preferred Non-Carpet Choices

Are you considering engineered wooden flooring? By all means, you probably should. Of the three types of hard flooring that are popular for use throughout the home, engineered wooden flooring is the most likely to be all things to all people. Before you go diving headfirst into the first engineered wooden floors that you see, though, be sure to compare to the main competitors. Those would be solid wood floors, and laminate wooden flooring.

Looks

Comparing how engineered wooden flooring and solid wood floors look is actually sort of goofy. In fact, the top layer, which is what you actually see, will be identical, dependent on the types of woods, not the types of floors. After all, the top layer of engineered wood flooring consists of a thin piece of solid wood. Laminate, though, can look very different from engineered. You can find a laminate wood floor that looks extremely fake, and then turn around and find on that a flooring expert has to get down on hands and knees to tell that it's not a solid or engineered wood floor. Since they're the same thing, it's an easy decision to say engineered wooden flooring looks just as good as solid, at least at first.

Sounds

Don't discount the importance of sound when choosing wooden flooring. For the most part, the floor doesn't get a lot of attention except as something to step on, but when it makes a disturbing noise, the attention it receives is not really wanted. Although most people don't even think about it, the easiest way to tell the difference between the three is often by sound. The hollow clunk that is characteristic of laminate wooden floors is a dead giveaway. Many laminate manufacturers swear up and down that this is no longer an issue. A solid wooden floor, though, is quite solid and silent. Well, that is, until it begins to creak. Although professionals do have ways to minimize it, pretty all solid wood floors will face a creak or two, or maybe more, which is an issue that laminate mostly can't develop. Engineered wooden floors could possibly creak, and might have a slightly hollow sound, but nether will be nearly as pronounced. Creaking in engineered flooring is somewhat rare, but possible. I guess, when comparing engineered wooden flooring to solid wooden floors, you just have to decide if which possibility bothers you most, or which brand you trust to not have these issues.

Durability

When talking about strength and durability, you can't beat a solid wooden floor. Even when it gets damaged, all you have to do is buff it and refinish it. That's really all there is to it. Engineered wooden flooring can be buffed, too, but not to the same degree. As the top, solid layer is thin, one can only sand it once or twice, depending on the brand. As with laminate, deep gouges and scuffs might result in you replacing boards to repair. However, laminate can't be buffed at all.

Price

Pricing of engineered wooden flooring is hard to gauge with any kind of certainty since, as with solid wooden floors, there often seems to be no rhyme or reason to price fluctuations. Being a very natural product, the price will move around a lot depending on availability of certain types of lumber. Because it takes more of this natural product, you'll notice that solid wooden floors often fluctuate more than engineered, although laminate typically is affected only by demand. All things considered, engineered wooden flooring typically costs a bit more than laminate, but a lot less than most solid wood floors.