Our carpet downstairs is gross thanks to a certain black dog. I'm ready to rip it all out and put in wood floors. I'm putting it in the entryway, dining room, office, hallway, and living room since it is all pretty open. I'll probably put new tiles in the kitchen because I hate the cheap beige tile in there.
So my mom's contractor told her to have engineered wood put in due to the humidity in Houston. I'm looking around and wondering what the benefits are of each: hardwood, engineered wood, or laminate. Any experience with any of these?
We put in the best laminate lumber liquidators had. So far we are loving them. When we were installing we has some scraps out on the driveway. It rained that night and we checked out the flooring pieces the next day and they were perfect looking. Left that piece in a puddle for 2 days and still no warping or swelling. Love my floors.
My mom and sister have the wood look tiles. They LOVE it, and so do I. I can't wait to do my own floors so I can put this stuff in. They both have dogs, and the floors are not damaged by claws, or water puddling on the floor from the water bowl. It cleans up easily. Mom lives on a lake, so she has worried about all of us dripping water all over the floor. No more. No worries about the grandbabies making messes.
We went with laminate flooring. When we looked at flooring everyone was trying to convince us to get real hardwood flooring but we have heard so much bad stuff about them if you have dogs. (Get scratched a lot by dogs paws, etc.)
I have hardwood in my main floor and I love it. They are a reddish color which helps hide any niks. The dark hardwood that is popular right now show any imperfection.
Post by HoneySpider on Feb 17, 2015 14:57:03 GMT -5
Our house had regular hardwoods in most of the house and we didn't notice any issues with the humidity (this was our house in Corpus so very close to the water and very humid). I don't know the benefits of different types though since we didn't install it ourselves.
We just did this in our 3 bedrooms/closets/master bath. My suggestion is to get several quotes. We did and got the companies through Angie's List. The quotes varied a lot. In some cases, laminate is actually more than hardwood, so don't commit to that without getting quotes for both! We ended up with hardwood and are super happy with it.
Our condo has laminate in the kitchen installed by previous owners. My only caution is to not cheap out on it. The stuff we have is a lighter color and I assume cheap because there are these tiny grooves that seem to collect dirt and it drives my nuts. Most people wouldn't notice, but I mop to keep up with it. And I don't even have a dog or kids to blame and we don't wear our shoes in the house. Otherwise, the better quality laminate looks nice.