Should we add new Pergo next to old?

December 4, 2017 9:06 AM

Our kitchen has ~15 year old Pergo in it (we love it) and we are thinking about extending it into the dining room. It looks like the Marigold Oak or Haley Oak shade. Would we be able to find an acceptable match in the current inventory and just add it on, or are we going to have to rip out all of the kitchen flooring as well?

We would have a professional install it. The line between the two spaces is at a roughly 30 degree angle to the boards and covered with a wooden transition. I am hoping they could remove the transition and all of the partial boards and just continue the same pattern into the dining room. Is it possible that this will look okay, or are we asking for a weird pair of mismatched floors? If it won't work at all, would it look weird to keep the transition in place and continue more Pergo on the other side in a shade close to the kitchen?

posted by soelo to Home & Garden (6 answers total)

Even if you had the name of the exact pattern and were able to get enough boxes of the same lot username in your kitchen....it would still look different. Materials fade and wear over time. A new box of the exact pattern would have been produced, well, differently. Maybe the ‘brown’ they used, even though technically the same, has a darker or lighter hue, or is more red or more grey than the original. Plus, the fading that your current floor has undergone.

My advice is to get a pattern that’s obviously different from your floor, so that it looks less like a mistake and more like a design choice. The different wear in the rooms will top off observant visitors that the areas were done at different times.

But frankly, unless you’re planning to sell in the next year or two, who cares? You like the material, you’ll choose a color that goes well with your living room decor. And when you do sell the home, the next buyer is just as likely to want new floors if everything matches as they are if it’s different.

If having two different colors would drive YOU crazy, save up for a year and do the big job the way you want it.
posted by bilabial at 9:18 AM on December 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

It would look OK to me. I have no idea how it will look to your sensibilities.
posted by humboldt32 at 9:48 AM on December 4, 2017

They usually sell Pergo samples for a few dollars wherever Pergo is sold. Maybe buy a little square of an ostensibly matching color and see how it looks next to the existing floor. That may give you an idea.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:56 AM on December 4, 2017

Isn't Pergo guaranteed for something weird like 14 years? If you're out of the warranty period it's probably worth replacing everything at once so it matches for the entire warranty period of the new floor. Otherwise you run the risk of it not matching now, then not matching in a slightly different way when you have to replace the worn-out stuff.

FWIW light tends to look different in different rooms anyway (due to window locations, lighting fixtures, etc) so a subtle mismatch may not be noticeable at all if there's a transition in between. If there's no transition and new planks butt up against old planks, even a subtle difference will stand out.
posted by fedward at 10:14 AM on December 4, 2017

The Pergo of today is a totally different product than the Pergo of 15 years ago. They even use a different system of installation. We have 15 year old Pergo that has held up wonderfully and when we did an addition, we wanted to extend the same product. No go. Luckily there was a natural break in our project so we were able to put down the new Pergo in a veryclosebutnotexact color without the new installation system causing an issue. We would not have been able to butt up the new to the old.

The new stuff is terrible quality compared to the old stuff- we hate it. We hate it enough that we are anticipating tearing out everything and laying down stone flooring instead. It creaks and feels plastic under the feet. Can’t wait to get rid of it. It’s already showing wear from the dog and it’s only about 5 years old.
posted by PorcineWithMe at 10:25 AM on December 4, 2017

Pergo has kept some of its patterns from years past, even as it has changed the type of liner built in underneath them. We had a pattern in most of the rooms in our old house and went to get more. We found that they made a product that was a visual match (exact same pattern) but was 1/4" thicker. In our case, butting the new stuff directly against the old wasn't even a choice. It had to have a barrier/strip.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:55 AM on December 4, 2017