We are doing a dining room/living room edition. About 800 ft.² of new flooring is needed. We were planning on using engineered hardwood flooring, but the flooring guy is trying to convince us that now is the time to do solid oak. The final cost is about double for solid oak flooring versus engineered hardwood floor. Anybody have an opinion? Is it worth the extra cost for solid hardwood flooring? Again, this is an a living room/dining room area.

You get what you pay for. How long will the engineer flooring last vs solid hardwood?

Pre finished solid oak or finished on site ?

All my floors are fake wood or tile....
why spend the cash?...
To refinish Hard wood will cost you double/ triple/ ....

Time change,,,, they say every 7 years people want something "different"
(I sill like saltillo tile)

Finished on site is what the flooring guy is trying to sell us.

The engineered floor is supposed to last 20 to 30 years. Solid hardwood is supposed to last a lifetime.

Even when solid oak flooring starts to get warn, it looks pretty good. The artificial floors look terrible when worn.

Keith

#2 or #3White Oak looks amazing, know a guy that finished his whole house in 1/4 sawn red oak I’m not a fan, it was everything cabinets, window trim , baseboards , crazy. It was just to much.

wws

with sanding and refinishing......
I love wood,,,but....

5 times as much for for materials and install

+++ and 4 more day without being able to live in your house while the sander guy is doing his thing.
no ,,,,
If does not pencil out.....

20 year old fake floor
Don't buy home depot crap
we rented it 4 five years,,to someone one with a "Kick me" sized dog...inside....

The red oak is coming from either a local source or somewhere within the U.S. Where is that engineered wood coming from? Red oak lasts forever. We had a dehumidifier leak on the engineer wood and the wood buckled and peeled of the base.

We have pre- finished solid hardwood flooring in our home, we love it, holding up real well. Goodfellows out of Montreal was the manufacturer.

Have any Amish flooring mills in your area...? Plenty around here that will whip out the real stuff at very reasonable prices.

Solid red oak. You will kick yourself when the engineered stuff starts looking bad.

If pre finished I would.

Most engineered flooring cannot be refinished because the top layer is thin veneer, where 3/4” solid hardwood can be refinished several times.

I have an Amish place in Ephrata, PA that mills old 200 year old beams/timbers into flooring. My favorite is white oak; random width 4, 5, 6 inch.
These cost 10.00 sqft installed and I sanded and poly’d them for another 200.00 in materials. I used the real deal in the downstairs floors.
Have southern yellow pine upstairs.

Had both in my last house. The ‘real’ stuff on the first floor and the Engineered flooring in 2 rooms we built out on the 2nd floor when we had a 3rd kid.

The Engineered looks good and held up well, but if you have the means to roll with it, go for the real hardwood. Side by side, I don’t believe there is a comparison. Real wood builds character as it wears, Engineered floor gets replaced when they wear.

I’ve installed many thousands of square feet of solid wood flooring, engineered flooring and laminate flooring. I’ve also refinished many thousands of square feet of wood flooring.

I’m always going to recommend solid wood. To me it is far better looking than any of the other stuff. It is also far more durable.

Just last week I refinished 1300 ft.² of white oak flooring that had been installed 60 years prior. It actually still looked pretty good but needed a refinish. You’re not going to get that type of durability, or even the ability to refinish, out of the other stuff.

Here is a before and after of one I did a couple of months ago. This floor is red oak and 110 years old. I also rebuilt the staircase.