Facts about
Engineered Wood Floors

Inside this Article:

Main Types of Hardwood Floors - Overview
Facts about Unfinished Hardwood Floors
Facts about Pre Finished Hardwood Floors
Facts about Solid Hardwood Flooring
Facts about Engineered Wood Floors
Facts about Acrylic Impregnated Wood Floor

Solid hardwood floors have reigned supreme for quite a while, ever since they started being used around the 17^th century. However, recently, with modern advances to technology and discoveries in the flooring industry, a new type of flooring emerged as a challenger, namely the engineered hardwood floor.

Engineered wood flooring might not look very different from the outside, but they stand out from solid hardwood floors if you take a peak in how they’re made. Instead of using one single piece of wood for a strip or plank, engineered hardwood floors are actually composed of layers of material, glued together.

The veneer layers usually found in engineered wood flooring offer several advantages, such as acoustic isolation, stability and comfort, increased protection against moisture and humidity and so forth. Usually, three to five layers are used, with thickness values ranging from ¼” to 9/16”.

The above characteristics not only make engineered hardwood flooring more resistant, but they also protect the rest of the room from environmental problems. In moist rooms or basements, engineered hardwood flooring is extremely helpful in keeping things clean and tidy.

Speaking of clean and tidy, there aren’t a lot of visual differences between solid hardwood floors and engineered ones. Actually, most of today’s top hardwood floor companies offer a wide range of woods and grains, including domestics such as oak or birch, or exotic wood.

Another great advantage that engineered wood flooring bring to the table is stability. The wood planks that are engineered for flooring are much more dimensionally stable than solid wood, which makes them more suitable to be installed on already-floored areas, concrete slabs, wooden subfloors and the likes.

By the way, not all of an engineered hardwood floor plank’s layers need to be from the same material. For example, if you want a particular type of wood (say, oak) that’s resistant to moisture, you can have the first layers made from this.

But if oak doesn’t really provide the color to suit the rest of the house, you can easily change the top layer to something else as a manufacturer. So you could basically have floors that are combinations of woods, giving you the best of all of those particular species.

Installing the engineered wood flooring isn’t particularly difficult either and maintaining them shouldn’t be a problem. Some floors are stapled or nailed down, while others are attached using a glue-down method, which is pretty much the standard for hardwood floor installation nowadays.

This means that if you’re familiar with installing solid hardwood floor, getting the engineered version installed and ready for use shouldn’t be a problem either.