Most flooring falls into one of the following six types. The type of flooring you choose will depend on your needs, budget—not to mention your personal style and aesthetic. Pros: Wood has a natural warmth, impressive wear resistance, and can be sanded and refinished several times. Pre-finished floors can hold up better than those finished on site, and their warranty comes from the factory, not the installer. Cons: Solid wood may expand and contract with varying humidity levels and can dent easily. Some can show wear quickly and become discolored from sunlight. Note: Unfinished flooring costs less than pre-finished, but higher installation costs can offset savings. Wood flooring is not a good choice for basements and other damp spaces. Installed cost: $5 to $10 per square foot. See Our Flooring Ratings for More on Solid Wood Pros: This flooring uses a thin veneer of real wood or bamboo over structural plywood, making it a cost-effective choice. Cons: Most engineered wood doesn't wear as well as solid wood or laminate.
It also dents easily. Most can be carefully refinished once, but the veneer on some may be too thin for even one refinish. Installed cost: $4 to $9 per square foot. For More on Engineered Wood Check Our Flooring Ratings Pros: Constructed of dense fiberboard with a photo beneath a clear-plastic protective layer, laminate can mimic nearly anything. Some brands use real cork beneath the clear layer. The best laminates resist scratching and discoloration from sunlight better than most wood products. Cons: The repetitive pattern can compromise realism. In terms of durability, you might be able to touch up minor flaws, but you'll have to replace the flooring once its outer layer has worn through. Installed cost: $3 to $7 per square foot. Read Our Flooring Ratings to Find the Best Laminate Pros: Especially good at fending off wear, dents, scratches, discoloration from sunlight, and stains. Easy installation, particularly for tiles or planks, and more color and design choices are available these days.
Cons: While the premium brands can mimic the look of stone, tile, and even oak, even the best products still look like vinyl up close. Top-of-the-line vinyl can cost as much or more than the best solid-wood and laminate floors. Installed cost: $2 to $6 per square foot. See Our Flooring Ratings for More on Vinyl Pros: Made of linseed oil and wood products, linoleum is a natural, resilient material. Today's products offer far more styles and colors. Linoleum tends to fend off discoloration from sunlight. Cons: Resistance to wear, scratches, and dents varies widely from product to product. Linoleum can also be relatively expensive. Installed cost: $4 to $8 per square foot. For the Top Linoleum Options Check Our Flooring Ratings Pros: This classic material tends to resist wear, moisture, scratches, dents, and stains. Cons: Tiles can crack and some grout can stain. Dropped cups and dishes break more easily. Tile is also relatively expensive and hard to install.
While some can now be floated without the usual cement and grout, that makes replacing cracked tiles more of a challenge. Installed cost: $8 to $15 per square foot; $5 to $8 for products that can float. Visit Our Flooring Ratings for More Details on Ceramic Tile Flooring Before you buy, bring home samples of your top flooring choices. Compare them side-by-side where they're going to be installed. Manufacturers try to match solid- and engineered-wood flooring for color and grain. But variations can occur from one batch to the next, so buy all the flooring you'll need at one time. On the flip side, laminate floorboards within a given package often have a similar pattern. To reduce repetition, pull boards from multiple packages when installing. To determine how much flooring you'll need, measure the room's square footage by multiplying its length times its width. (Divide an irregularly shaped room into smaller rectangles, calculate the square footage of each rectangle, and then add them together.)
Then buy 7 to 10 percent extra to allow for mistakes, bad samples, and waste. Consider buying an extra box of flooring for future repairs or additions. Know Your Traffic Patterns Common high-traffic areas are entryways to rooms and to the house itself. If you have pets or kids, the family room can also be a busy place. Our top products performed best in simulated foot-traffic tests. For less-busy areas, consider one of the top-engineered wood or bamboo floors, for their natural veneer and easy installation. Preparing to Install Flooring Before installing wood or laminate flooring, unpack it and let it sit for one to three days in the space where it will be installed so that its temperature and moisture become acclimated to the levels in the room. Vinyl floors with the industry's FloorScore certification (pictured below) emit relatively low levels of volatile organic compounds—substances linked to health problems and pollution. For wood flooring, certification by the Forest Stewardship Council and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative offers some assurance that your flooring comes from responsibly managed forests—a plus for the planet.
Check packaging for product and manufacturer certification. • Check prices with overstock discounters. They buy directly from manufacturers, and often sell flooring below list price. • You can often save on opened or damaged boxes or on flooring with minor flaws that you can install where it won't be noticed. • Hiring a pro to do the installation? Trim hundreds of dollars off the job by doing the prep work yourself. For more helpful information see our Flooring Ratings. Looking for a Flooring Contractor? Installing a new floor could be tricky. The site connects you with local contractors to help with maintenance or remodeling projects, making home improvement that much easier.I’ve looked at flooring from both sides now… and it’s the horrors of applying polyurethane I recall. Apologies to Joni Mitchell for that, but when it comes to installing solid or engineered wood flooring, prefinished is my choice. Some pros disagree, but these are my reasons:
You can walk on your new floor immediately. With flooring that is finished on-site using oil-based polyurethane, the homeowner must wait days, sometimes even weeks, before moving furniture back into the room. Even though the floor may be dry to the touch, it will be vulnerable to scraping until the waiting time has elapsed and the finish has fully cured. I once had to shuffle around in socks and remain furniture-less for four weeks after applying three coats of poly to a floor. (Waterborne polyurethane finishes dry to touch quickly but can have varying cure times—some quite long.) Related: Solid vs. Engineered: Selecting Wood Flooring No issues with VOCs and your family’s health. For days after applying an oil-based polyurethane, you will smell and breathe in vapors from polyurethane resins and solvents. VOCs have been shown to be carcinogenic, and some waterborne polyurethanes produce them too. Why not buy prefinished so that the curing takes place in a factory, not in your living room?
No worries about dust. Dust and errant hairs are the enemy of on-site floor finishing, but these annoyances won’t have any effect on your new prefinished flooring. You will, however, need to take measures to protect prefinished floors if you have contractors tromping around with tools and equipment en route to other jobs around the house. Installation in one session. There’s no necessity of staying home to complete the various stages of an on-site finishing job—sanding, sealing, staining, applying polyurethane and so on. A crew of two had our 300-square-foot solid wood floor installed, with underlayment, in only about two hours. A better finish than what homeowners or contractors can apply on-site. Factory-applied finishes are incredibly durable and often come with a lifetime warranty. The Mullican red oak flooring, shown above, will stay new-looking for longer. It came with a PPG UV-cured resin and nanoparticle coating that is highly scratch- and abrasion-resistant.
I can’t even scratch it with my fingernails.Prefinished solid wood floors initially cost more than unfinished wood flooring—about $2 per square foot for a good grade of red oak. But once you factor in finishing costs, prefinished ends up being less expensive. Okay, you’ve heard my arguments. But some homeowners and many contractors disagree with me and prefer site-finishing wood floors. New construction or large renovations. Many contractors prefer to wait until the end of the job to finish the floor. That way, a dropped tool or a mortar pebble under a work boot can’t mar the finished floor—and ruin customer relations. Greater choice of finishes. There is no question that the site-finished route opens up a greater variety of choices with respect to color and shade. Prefinished products, however, come in more species and stains than ever before.Prefinished floorboards usually have micro-bevels on all edges. These bevels hide slight discrepancies between board depths and widths.