Wood Engineered Floors: The Things You Need to Know

Wood engineered floors will be your compromise when you want to have hardwood installed into your home. With real hardwoods, they can easily invite moisture, especially if you’re not properly maintaining them. When this happens, they will easily rot and will definitely not last for a long time that you hope them to be. Laminate floors are easy to install and clean, but they can never capture the real beauty of hardwoods.

The Real Characteristics of Hardwood Engineered Floors

Even if an engineered wood flooring carries itself a lot of benefits, there are still others who don’t know their real characteristics. It’s time to be enlightened of the real characteristics of engineered wood flooring:

1. An engineered wood floor is made of real wood. Just because it has a word “engineered” attached to it doesn’t really mean it’s fake or pseudo-hardwood. An engineered hardwood flooring is still composed of hardwood, though not all parts of it. At the top of the engineered floors are melamine-infused papers or laminates. The bottom, on the other hand, is composed of wood chips.

2. You can remove the scratches and dings by sanding. One of the foremost benefits of engineered flooring is the fact that it can be sanded, especially if there are scratches into the surface. This is something that you cannot accomplish on your laminate or worse real hardwood. However, there are certain things that you have to remember before you decide to sand wood engineered floors. First, you have to make sure that you don’t sand them more than 3 times. You should also ask the help of a professional sander, since he’s the best person who can easily gauge the thickness of the engineered floors.

3. The wood engineered floors can easily be used and even walked on. Unlike real wood, which you need to sand or even seal, before you can finally add furniture and cabinets on top of it, or allow people to pass by, the engineered floors already have them. All you need to do is to install them directly into the floor, and you can already allow them to accept foot traffic.

4. There are a lot of ways on how to install wood engineered floors. One of the biggest problems with hardwood floors is their difficult installation. With engineered floors, however, you have wide variety of choices. For one, you can go for floating floor, which means you don’t need to attach it directly into the subfloor. This permits the wood engineered floors to be used on top of laminates, vinyls, and other kinds of flooring. You can also make use of nails, especially if the engineered floors are very thin, in order to allow them to achieve more stability.

5. Wood engineered floors can tolerate moisture a lot better. If you think that you can no longer make use of engineered floors to bathrooms and kitchens, then you’re wrong. Engineered floors have a better moisture tolerance. They don’t easily rot because of water. However, they should not be used in places that are always flooded such as your basements.