Hardwood Laminate Flooring vs Hardwood Flooring
I have a friend who recently decided that he wanted to renovate his house and as part of that decided to renew his flooring using either hardwood laminate flooring that glued to the subfloor or hardwood laminate flooring that acted as floating boards. He gave me a call to get my advice – strangely enough I had done exactly the same thing several years ago. I was faced with the decision of whether to go with the glue or glueless hardwood laminate flooring. So I went through the advice with him that I had received. This wasn’t the only thing that he was considering – he had also been looking at cork laminate flooring and bamboo laminate flooring. Ultimately the reason he had decided on hadwood laminate flooring was because it provided a cheaper flooring alternative whilst still looking as good as the real thing. This of course wasn’t always the case. In the past hardwood laminate floor boards often looked fake in comparison to the genuine article. Lets face it – what can really compare to oak hardwood floorboards or maple hardwood floorboards or even pine flooring. These days though, the technology that hardwood laminate floors are made with is outstanding. It’s made of several layers including a core made from mdf or plywood. It’s layers also act as a noise retardant and they resist scuff, stains, scratches and burns. Not only that, the top layer incorporates an actual photo of the hardwood allowing you to have the full range of patterns and colours of just about any type of wood including oak, pine and maple. What’s fantastic about this is that the hardwood laminate flooring, because it is made up of layers, has the superior strength and yet allows you to have the look of hardwood flooring in woods that would normally not be suitable for flooring due to their softness, stainability etc. So now the argument between laminate vs hardwood is not so weighted towards the hardwood.
Laminate Hardwood Flooring costs
Anyway, I digress. So he was mainly choosing hardwood laminate flooring because it was cheaper than traditional hardwood floorboards. That reminds me. It is also possible to get engineered hardwood laminate flooring where timber that has been reclaimed from old building sites is used as the top layer of the hardwood laminate flooring boards or planks. Obviously this gives a more genuine appearance along with the texture of the wood. But I’ll delve into engineered hardwood laminate floors in a later post. Actually, now that I come to think of it, there is a form of bamboo hardwood laminate flooring that falls into this category that uses shredded bamboo as the top layer. Again this would take away any possibility of the bamboo hardwood laminate flooring appearing fake.
So with costs in mind he also wasn’t very excited about having to get hardwood floor installers to come in and install the floor for him. This is another area where he was able to save money – through installing the hardwood laminate flooring himself. Even though he was a beginner, ge does after all have a small amount of skill in the handy man area but even for beginners hardwood laminate flooring installation is fairly straightforward. All you really need is a flat subfloor, a hand saw, measuring tape, marking pen and any mouldings for joins between doors or where the flooring ends at doors. In terms of a flat subfloor, the level of flatness required is determined by the hardwood laminate floor boards or planks themselves. If they are relatively thin i.e. only 5mm thick, you’ll need an extremely flat surface with very little variance over the a yard length. If the boards are thicker, then they will be able to stand a little more difference between the highs and lows of the floor over a certain length. Either way the hardwood laminate flooring manufacturer will include this information with the instructions. Make sure you read these instructions before attempting to install the hardwood laminate flooring as this is the type of essential information that they will share with you.
Laminate Hardwood Flooring Installation
So just to recap, my friend had decided upon hardwood laminate flooring because it was effectively like getting cheap hardwood flooring – the hardwood laminate boards looked as good as the real thing, were very strong, durable and resistant to scuffing and damage and didn’t need professional hardwood floor installation. In fact if there were some form of damage occurred to the laminate floor, hardwood laminate flooring repair basically just involved disassembling the floor up to the board or boards that had been damaged and replacing those boards with new ones. This is assuming that a completely floating hardwood laminate floor is being used which means the boards are not glued together, or to the floor. It is possible to have a floating hardwood laminate floor where the boards are glued only to each other but obviously if this is the case, the floor is there permanently. My friend also had to make the decision as to whether to use a flooring system where glue was required to fix the boards but in the end decided against it. Although glue would create a tighter fit, he wasn’t interested in having to go to the trouble it involved. Obviously it’s a lot messier and its important to keep the glue from drying on the laminate surface. One advantage using glue has is that it keeps the flooring slightly more resistant to water as it can’t seep between the laminate planks if you drop some water on them. The other advantage is that if your subfloor is a little less flat than you expected, and you go ahead and lay the glueless hardboard laminate flooring, the unevenness under the floor can cause the hardwood laminate floor boards to separate leaving an unsightly gap. This wasn’t enough to cause my friend to go with the glue – he was quite happy that he would make sure he had a very even floor and he didn’t expect to be spilling to much water. Also being a beginner, he felt just laying a hardwood laminate floor without the added stress of getting the glueing right, was enough. As it turned out, he was installing the hardwood laminate flooring where he had previously had carpet. When he pulled the carpet up, there were floorboards underneath (no, not the attractive oak hardwood floor we were talking about earlier but rather fairly unsightly builders flooring planks), and these created a very even floor – obviously the builders of the house had done an excellent job. This also meant he didn’t even need a plastic barrier between the subfloor and the hardwood laminate flooring which would have been necessary had the subfloor been concrete. The last reason he decided to go with this flooring is that hardwood laminate flooring care and cleaning was fairly straightforward – simple vacuuming was normally sufficient and if there was any dried on dirt, just a quick damp mopping over with a gentle floor cleaner would keep the floors looking new.
So for my friend, as he was a beginner when it came to flooring but still wanted to do-it-yourself, the decision was almost complete. The final part of the decision was to make sure he wanted hardwood laminate flooring over another type of laminate e.g. cork laminate or bamboo laminate flooring. Both of these were also attractive but in the end, he preferred the dark richness and texture of oak hardwood laminate flooring.
I’ll leave it there and in the next post I’ll probably cover exactly how his beginner hardwood laminate flooring installation went. Say that 10 times fast!
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