[Vegetable]

Just to be clear, engineered floors can be sanded once or twice? My home is far from historic (1999 build) so in 2120 people might think it's a vintage masterpiece.

[tony20009]

Originally Posted by Mr Tonka

To expand on the differences between Laminate, Solid wood, and engineered wood.....Engineered floors, being constructed with cross grain layers like plywood create dimensional stability unmatched by any solid hardwood or laminate....


...

Just curiosity here, but engineered wood was explained to me as being essentially the same as plywood, but with a snazzy veneer on top and perhaps a bit thicker overall. Is that an accurate depiction? If not, how are the two different? Similar?

All the best.

[Mr Tonka]

Originally Posted by Vegetable

Just to be clear, engineered floors can be sanded once or twice? My home is far from historic (1999 build) so in 2120 people might think it's a vintage masterpiece.

Most engineered floors can't be sanded at all. But that's the gimmick of the whole "sand and refinish" line. The only reason you need to do that is if some type of damage has occurred. If it's a refinish due to wear, you never need to sand the wood. You simply screen the existing finish prepping it to accept new finish and apply new finish. In that respect, you can refinish engineered floors as much as you like. But actually sanding the wood floors is a usually a no go. Thats usually a no go with solid wood too. Like i said, it's usually only to rectify some damage or to integrate new solid wood floors into existing solid wood floors. Like for an addition to the house or expanding a room.

Originally Posted by tony20009

Just curiosity here, but engineered wood was explained to me as being essentially the same as plywood, but with a snazzy veneer on top and perhaps a bit thicker overall. Is that an accurate depiction? If not, how are the two different? Similar?

All the best.

It's plywood that's constructed with more pressure, more heat and higher quality adhesives; all to guard against delimitation.

Most manufacturers use the same species of wood for all layers. When they don't, they will use a species which is more robust and dense than the typical pine used in construction grade plywood.

The snazzy top layer of wood is either rotary pealed or sliced. Creating other differences between construction grade plywood and engineered floors. The difference between the two is basically aesthetics and that as you might imagine, you'd get more of the pretty layer by rotary pealing than slicing. But you get some wonderful graining effects from slicing too. Then again, rotary pealing yields some great grinning effects as well. Depends largely on the species, and age of the tree.

Tangent: The aesthetic of the wood is dependent on a few factors. The largest is obviously species and the next largest is forest location, then age. Colder climate forests have slower growth which creates tighter grain and uniform color. Tropical climate forests have faster growth which creates looser grain and some times wild color variation. That anecdote i told about the Bucs owner's suite above is a great example. The contractor got a sample for the owners to choose from, it was a 2"x2" sample of nearly black wood. The name of the wood was Brazilian Ebony. This was one of my first experiences with an exotic hardwood. When we started installing we saw that even though the sample was almost midnight black, the actual color of the wood varied between black, dark brown, light brown, blond, and even GREEN boards. We had to order about 50% more wood to weed out the lighter boards. They still didn't like it so we screened the finish and applied that pigmented layer of urethane.


The big difference is in the finish. A factory finish is far and away better than an onsite finish. The factory has worked with chemical companies to hone their finishes to react exactly the way they want them to in a specific curing environment. That will always trump curing in your newly constructed / renovated home.

And when we're talking about wearability, we're talking about the finish. It's the finish that gets walked on, crawled on, lived on. The wood never gets touched. If it weren't for the finish, we'd wear out that wood quickly, relatively speaking of course.

[tony20009]

Originally Posted by Mr Tonka

....

It's plywood that's constructed with more pressure, more heat and higher quality adhesives; all to guard against delimitation. ....

[excellent 411 on how EW is like and not like plywood deleted for space]

TY. Exactly what I wanted to know.

All the best.

[csu87]

Originally Posted by Mr Tonka

Right?! Whatever makes people happy i guess. She didn't even bat an eye at the price. We looked through the showroom at samples for about 15 min before she found the one she liked. Looked for an additional 2 min and asked how much. I told her and she handed me a CC. lol

In the scheme of Good, Better, Best, Ultimate; the average price for the "better" grade of carpet, with pad and installation is about $3.50/sf. The closet carpet above was about $28.00/sf. To be fair, the closet was about 600sf.

I bet you saved a lot by doing it yourself. If i recall, skilled labor in N. Colorado is expensive.

Yeah, skilled labor is expensive here, but not near as much as some areas of the country. Still saved probably close to $10k though doing it myself. Its funny you mention the $28/sqft for carpet. I was watching one of those remodeling shows last night, and they used $30/sqft carpet and I was like, "so thats what extremely expensive carpet looks like." It looked almost exactly like my $3/sqft carpet lol.

Forgot about this option until I was looking through some old photos, but have you thought about the wood tile? I installed ~1500 sqft of wood grain tile in a condo I had a few years back and I really liked it. Again though, I ended up selling that place almost right after I finished those floors, so Im not sure how well it holds up, but I actually preferred the look and feel to real and engineered wood. Granted, this was in Arizona so it made the floors cooler and kept the overall temperature down some and that may have been the biggest benefit.

[gmfive]

Originally Posted by Vegetable

Just to be clear, engineered floors can be sanded once or twice? My home is far from historic (1999 build) so in 2120 people might think it's a vintage masterpiece.

You can choose between a 2mm or 4mm top layer for engineered wood. The latter is preferable. The overall thickness remains the same at 1/2 inch for engineered vs 3/4 of an inch for solid wood.

[Mr Tonka]

Originally Posted by csu87

Yeah, skilled labor is expensive here, but not near as much as some areas of the country. Still saved probably close to $10k though doing it myself. Its funny you mention the $28/sqft for carpet. I was watching one of those remodeling shows last night, and they used $30/sqft carpet and I was like, "so thats what extremely expensive carpet looks like." It looked almost exactly like my $3/sqft carpet lol.

Forgot about this option until I was looking through some old photos, but have you thought about the wood tile? I installed ~1500 sqft of wood grain tile in a condo I had a few years back and I really liked it. Again though, I ended up selling that place almost right after I finished those floors, so Im not sure how well it holds up, but I actually preferred the look and feel to real and engineered wood. Granted, this was in Arizona so it made the floors cooler and kept the overall temperature down some and that may have been the biggest benefit.

Wood look porcelain tile is becoming very popular and manufacturing technology is making more traditional plank sizes possible. There is a large selection of 6" wide by 36" and even 48" long plank tiles now. It's an awesome option if you have kids and/or dogs that will typically make wood floors look horrible. Most of the time, the husband will want the wood for the look and feel, and the wife will want tile for the durability. The wood look tile is a great option.

Many of them are coming with rectified edges now as well. The curing process for porcelain tile is the same as ceramic; it has to be fired in a kiln to create the hardness. When this happens, all the moisture is evaporated from the material and shrinking occurs. This is why grout is necessary. The tiles aren't completely square and for that reason can't be butted together, hence filling the tile joints with colored grout.

With a rectified tile, they will mill the edges down making the tile square allowing for butt joint installation. Though most people don't take advantage of this feature because then you're getting into marble / granite floor installation prices. It's a much slower process to install with butt joints and the flatness of the subfloor plays a part in whether or not a mud bed is needed. Obviously a perfectly flat floor is needed to get a perfectly flat tile install. Since almost no floors are perfectly flat, a mud bed is typically needed to achieve that.

Porcelain is obviously the way to go, but even more, a through body porcelain is the top of the line. This just means that the body of the tile (under the top glaze) is the same base color of the top of the tile. That way, if you get a chip from dropping a pan or something, it's not very noticeable.

We've been doing a lot of large format porcelain tile these days. We're talking 3' x 5' to 4' x 8' sheets of porcelain tile. Talk about expensive labor... wow.

Originally Posted by gmfive

You can choose between a 2mm or 4mm top layer for engineered wood. The latter is preferable. The overall thickness remains the same at 1/2 inch for engineered vs 3/4 of an inch for solid wood.

Engineered wood floors typically come in the following thickness: 5/16, 3/8, 7/16, 1/2, 9/16, 5/8, and 3/4 inch. There is no industry wide standard for top layer thickness. It varies by manufacture and even within the product lines of the manufacturers. You can find 1/2 thick wood with a 4mm top layer and 3/4 thick wood with a 1mm top layer. However, almost all engineered wood have an odd number of layers in common. But again, you can find 5/8 thick wood with 3 layers and 1/2 thick wood with 7 layers. It all depends on the manufacture.

I'm somewhat old school, so i still feel that the more layers the engineered wood has, the more dimensionally stable it is. But many manufacturers these days will over only 3 to 5 layers while offering life time warranties on delimitation.

Speaking of warranties, use it as a gauge pointing to how confident the manufacturer is about that product not failing within that time frame. I know when we see a 50 year wear warranty we tend to think that's just not applicable to us because we'll move or change the floor within that time frame. And part of them offering a 50 year wear warranty is hedged upon those likelihoods, but that wear warranty is again talking about the finish and they are capable of simulating 50 years of wear in their testing facilities. They can't hardly test 50 years for delimitation without waiting 50 years. But wear is something they can simulate and if they weren't able to see data supporting wearability of 50 years with at least one person living on the floor, i don't think they would offer it. Keep in mind that wear warranties don't warrant against scratches or dents. A wear warranty states that you won't wear through the finish top coat within that allotted time frame.

Some of these wear layers are no joke. We used to rub two products together finish to finish to test them out. There was this old manufacture who started the aluminum oxide impregnation movement who's products would literally sand down the competitions finish coat without leaving a mark on their product. Just by rubbing them together for about 2 min you could completely sand through the competition's finish to bare wood. These days, almost every manufacture used some type of aluminum oxide or ceramic impregnation in their finish.