Laminate or Pre-Finished Hardwood?

January 17, 2005 8:00 PM

HomeImprovementFilter: We are about to start the finishing work on an addition, and we're trying to decide what type of flooring to buy:Laminate, or pre-finished hardwood? We've looked at both, and I think I like pre-finished hardwood better, but I wanted some real-life commentary, rather than my speculation. Any laminate horror stories? Successes? Pre-finished camp have anything to add?
posted by Medieval Maven to Home & Garden (28 answers total)

Installed Pergo 3 years ago, 60% of house, high traffc areas.

3 kids, 2 dogs, and 2 adults, it has outperformed our wildest expectations. We have countlessly dropped, spilled, scraped, and soiled to very little permanent effect. Anything serious just needs a little hand buffng and its out. We are very careful about all furnishings havng proper pads and safeguards.

Hghly recommended.
posted by omidius at 8:20 PM on January 17, 2005

If you've got pets or kids, go with Pergo. Hardwood gets scratched too easily.
posted by mudpuppie at 8:28 PM on January 17, 2005

What is the impact on resale value of a house sporting laminate hardwood versus a house sporting the real hardwood flooring? It's always been my assumption that real hardwood flooring is always more in demand than the cheaper laminate flooring.
posted by NoMich at 8:45 PM on January 17, 2005

me sis just installed bamboo hardwood look alike - its wonderful looking stuff, tough as nails and is renewable... and fairly inexpensive.. might be worth doing a little shopping around for.
posted by specialk420 at 8:59 PM on January 17, 2005

I have installed both. Laminate is faster. Laminate is durable. Laminate is generally low cost but hardwood just, (too my eye) looks a whole lot better.
For a rental, or something I was going to sell in the next 5 years or so, I would do laminate. For a place I planed to stay in I would do hardwood.
Also for a bedroom or playroom take a look at cork flooring. It comes in modular form just like laminate and is quiet, warm and nice on the feet. May be a bit pricy.
And just for the record my house has 80-year-old hardwood on two floors and cork in the basement.
posted by arse_hat at 9:23 PM on January 17, 2005

Cheap laminate is cheap laminate. I installed some in the condo before selling it; it probably won't hold up well for more than five years.

My next floor will be vertical carbonized bamboo. This isn't a hardwood look-alike: it's harder than hardwood. Unfortunately it isn't nearly as inexpensive as I'd like, unless I purchase a container-load straight from China. :-(

I'd love to do cork (and it lately seems about the same price as good hardwood) but I'm not confident of its durability, nor that it could work at all well with my rough-cut cedar ceilings. (Damn those ceilings, so very great, so damn difficult to work with!)
posted by five fresh fish at 9:35 PM on January 17, 2005

FFF cork is quite hardy. My girlfriend's parents have a bedroom with cork from the 60's and they had three boys, one at a time, in there. It looks just fine. Better than the hardwood in the other bedrooms.
posted by arse_hat at 10:06 PM on January 17, 2005

FFF - the Library of Congress building and Wright's Falling Water house have old cork floor installations. Can't help you on the cedar ceilings, but they sound nice!

MM - laminate looks cheap. It just does. It's the nature of the beast. Go with hardwood if you can afford it.
posted by acridrabbit at 10:29 PM on January 17, 2005

I'm also finishing an addition, and we're using tongue-in-groove pine. We used it for the ceiling, and it looks great. It's going to be a pain to do the floor with it, but it's only going to cost about $350 for a 14 x 20 room. The rest of the house already has it, and I love it.

Take your time and pick out each piece individually.
posted by atchafalaya at 4:50 AM on January 18, 2005

Cheap laminate was great, until one of the cats puked on it while we were gone for a weekend. This resulted in a "bubble" where the laminate soaked up the moisture, and the piece had to be replaced.

The new house is all geniuine hardwood, and I'm glad.
posted by mrbill at 5:34 AM on January 18, 2005

Also, you can easily tell when you're walking on pergo compared to walking on wood - it *sounds* different.
posted by mrbill at 5:34 AM on January 18, 2005

what's "pre-finished hardwood"? i'm lucky enough to live in places with original wooden floors. one has eucalyptus parquet (wooden blocks) that is treated with pu varnish. it's easy to clean and pretty tough, but the blocks sometimes wear loose. the other has alerce (i think - a chilean hardwood) boards that are waxed. that's quite labour intensive to maintain and marks easily, but has a deep lustre that the varnish doesn't. both look/feel/sound more like "the real thing" than any laminate i've seen. at the moment i prefer the waxed floor, but polishing it is still a novelty...
posted by andrew cooke at 5:36 AM on January 18, 2005

Response by poster: Pre-finished hardwood comes with the stain (if any) and the polyurethane (or whatever durable coating) already on each individual bit. This means you put it down, and then you can use it, without the waiting of old-fashioned hardwoods. My parents have hardwoods done the old-fashioned way, and we couldn't walk on the floors for like a week or something. Bamboo . . . you have no idea how many times I've looked at bamboo. Le sigh. I would love it, but I think it might kill my budget. Thanks for the feedback!
posted by Medieval Maven at 5:50 AM on January 18, 2005

"pre-finished hardwood" sounds suspect to old-fashioned conservative me. i suspect (with no real basis, i admit) that you're either paying for questionable convenience or it's a decent price because they're cutting corners. does it lay on top of the floor like laminate? does it come in sheets larger than the individual pieces of hardwood? is it solid or just a veneer? i'd be worried about it sounding "hollow" like laminate and looking odd if there are less joints than pieces of wood. and if it's a veneer or thin sheet then i'd be worried about how you'll maintain it in ten years when you want to revarnish - the big sanders take a lot of wood off with the varnish - they'll destroy a veneer. if your extension is new then can't you lay traditional pine floorboards? they aren't expensive and varnish to a nice finish that will mellow with age. you can stain them if you want something darker now. you'd need to apply several thin layers of varnish and it'll be a few days after that before its dry enough to use, but down the line it will be easier to maintain, imho.
posted by andrew cooke at 6:26 AM on January 18, 2005

Prefinished sounds funny to me, too. It's easier to hide less-than-ideal wood when you're only seeing it poststain. I have zero basis for this, beyond my suspicious nature, but I would worry prefinished is the catch-all for the stuff a company couldn't sell unfinished because they were not up to snuff.
posted by Kellydamnit at 6:52 AM on January 18, 2005

Prefinished hardwood is OK. It's not veneer, it comes in individual boards, it goes down just like normal wood floors. Just, when you're done, you don't have to finish it. The finish that is put on at the factory is far more durable than polyurethane applied on site -- many floor manufacturers offer 15 or even 30 year warranties.
posted by RustyBrooks at 7:01 AM on January 18, 2005

oh ok. sounds sweet (but how do you fasten it down?)
posted by andrew cooke at 7:08 AM on January 18, 2005

For long-term, I wouldn't do anything but hardwood. There are two big reasons:

1. Laminate is just that. When it goes, you have to pretty much redo the whole thing. With hardwood, you can sand and refinish agressively 3 or 4 times and you're still good. Since that might happen every 15 years with very high traffic, you're talking upwards of 60 years life in high traffic.
2. spot repair - for localized damage (like burns, gouges, etc), you can fix your laminate only as long as that variety is purchaseable or if you've stored some in a way that it survived), whereas with hardwood, you will probably be able to get something that matches as long as there are trees

When I did this (gratuitous self-link), I had some salvaged flooring that matched pretty well in size and I chose to live with the poor match in grain since the cost of the salvaged wood was free. The time for finishing is 1 day (ready for traffic in 2) if you use water-based polyurethane. It is a few days more if you use oil-based (but oil-based is more durable).
posted by plinth at 7:09 AM on January 18, 2005

(answering my own question from google, they seem to be nailed/stapled through the tongue (ouch!))
posted by andrew cooke at 7:16 AM on January 18, 2005

There are two types of vertical bamboo flooring: laminate, where it's solid bamboo top-to-bottom; and engineered, where it's more like plywood.

I'm curious as to whether the engineered is really worth the additional expense, especially given that bamboo is already more dimensionally stable than wood.

Also, those of you getting horny for bamboo, what is it you like about it? Are you more attracted to the full-face bamboo, where you can see the "knots", or the edge-wise bamboo, which has minimal texture and grain? Do you like the natural, light carbonized, or dark carbonized better?

Finally, do any of you have advice on bamboo?

(I hope this isn't a thread hijacking. I think the original question has been adequately answered...)
posted by five fresh fish at 11:07 AM on January 18, 2005

Response by poster: I don't think it's a hijack, and it's my question. :) I want bamboo for a number of reasons -- my research indicates it is very hard and resists scarring, for one, and for two, I like that it's more renewable. It's like putting my money where my mouth is with buying a more fuel-efficient car. And I like both types, light and dark carbonized.
posted by Medieval Maven at 11:54 AM on January 18, 2005

Maybe we should do a mass purchase of bamboo direct from Precious Bamboo. It's about $2.50 a foot, plus shipping, plus whatever duty fees there are.

Bugger distributing it, though.

NOTE: I've heard Canada is about to impose anti-dumping tariffs on laminates, and this possibly includes bamboos. It'll add $0.50 per foot, IIRC.
posted by five fresh fish at 1:11 PM on January 18, 2005

I vote for true hardwood floor, prefinished or not -- just no veneers. That floor should last over 100 years without extraordinary disasters -- and then it could be removed form your crumbling shell-of-a-home and put into another, turned into charcoal, furniture or a fine crackling fire.

An "green" alternative I did not see mentioned: linoleum. With the right approach, it can look great.
posted by Dick Paris at 1:35 PM on January 18, 2005

All wood and wood like floors are put down pretty much in the same ways. They are strips, of varying lengths and sometimes varying widths. One side of the strip has a tongue, the other a groove, so they fit together to make a flat mesh. This is true of laminate, hardwood and engineered flooring (basically veneered, more in a second). Each one of these can be attached in lots of ways, the 3 predominant ones being nailed or stapled through the tongue, glue to the floor with a thick adhesive (a bit like tiling) or "floating" on the floor, with each strip glued to each other, a big floating panel. Which one you choose varies largely with the situation. Here in texas the only way to put flooring on grade is gluing it down or floating it. Gluing it down is only recommended for fairly thick flooring or very dry foundations. Oh -- or you can build up the floor several inches with a wood platform and staple to that. If you don't mind raising the floors several inches.

Regarding engineered flooring, it's basically playwood with a layer of veneer on top. Quality depends largely on two factors: how thick is the veneer and how was it cut? Plain cut looks bad, it's wavy and looks kind of fake.

Regarding the life of veneered flooring: the life of wood floors is all above the tongue. Meaning, once you've sanded down to where the tongue/groove is that's it, you can't go any further. So an engineered floor with a thick veneer level (1/4" is a good amount) is going to last roughly as long as completely solid wood.

It is, in some cases, preferable to solid wood. Again, here in texas, we have concrete foundations and in some parts of the country, particularly with older homes, you'll see condensation seeping through the concrete. Engineered flooring is less susceptible to warping, it's more stable. Much, much more stable.
posted by RustyBrooks at 1:51 PM on January 18, 2005 [1 favorite]

Oh, regarding stability, real wood floors can move up to 1/8" per foot of width between seasons. For a 8' wide room that's 1 inch. For a 16' wide room that's 2 inches. That's a LOT of movement to expect a nailed or glued down floor to accomodate. Engineered floor has basically no movement to speak of. For those in areas where the flooring won't get moistened it's not so much of an issue.
posted by RustyBrooks at 2:11 PM on January 18, 2005

I'm personally not a fan of pre-finished hardwoods, because the seams in the finish always look exaggerated, and tend to make the floor look more uneven than it really is. Of course, I could be the only one on the planet that is bothered by that. But when the sun shines across a pre-finished wood floor, to me it just looks cheap.

I'd say go for traditional, site-finished wood floors if it is feasable in your area. I really don't think its that much more expensive these days, at least not where I live, and it'll look nicer and last longer.

I also like laminate under certain circumstances. I have it in my basement, where there is no real wood around for it to clash with, and I needed to be able to float the floor over leftover tiles and other miscellaneous muck. Personally, I prefer Mannington over Pergo... their designs just seem a little more interesting to me.
posted by spilon at 2:16 PM on January 18, 2005

It's true that pre-finished floors are going to look different than site-finished floors. This is because with a site finished floor, once it's laid down, the whole thing is sanded level and then finished. With pre-finished floors, the edges of each piece of wood are generally bevelled so that slight differences in height of the wood pieces are less noticable.

The key here is in the quality of the pre-finished flooring. Very accurately milled flooring does not need to include these microbevels and can look very nearly perfect.
posted by RustyBrooks at 2:47 PM on January 18, 2005

We put down Pergo in our kitchen and dining room six years ago. It looks as good now as it did then. I'd do it again.

You want your flooring to last? Leave your shoes at the door.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 6:00 PM on January 18, 2005