A recent survey was conducted with the goal of ascertaining which features are most important to prospective buyers when they are actively in the process of purchasing a new house. Realtors were initially amazed upon discovering that hardwood floors did not even make the list. When survey respondents were questioned further, it was learned that they didn’t consider wood flooring an option because it was something that they simply assumed would be in any house they would seriously consider buying.
Americans have long had a love affair with wood flooring, but there are wood floors and then there are floors made of wood. Would it surprise you to learn that, worldwide, engineered wood flooring now outsells solid planks? This is not yet the case in the United States but is expected to be before too long.
While laminate, vinyl and veneer are lumped into the engineered flooring category, they are not true wood products. Laminate is a composite of resin and fiberboard with a picture of wood pasted on top, vinyl is plastic made to look like wood and veneer has a paper-thin layer of wood glued to something like fiberboard. Engineered wood flooring is real wood, cut into thin layers and pressed together forming a plank.
One of the main reasons that engineered wood has become so popular for flooring is that it has less of a tendency to warp than solid wood does when there are temperature and humidity changes. This is because the layers are arranged with the grains running in different directions, which makes the end result exceptionally stable. Because of this, engineered hardwood flooring can even be installed in areas like basements, which were off limits for wood in the past.
Besides increased sturdiness, engineered wood can be manufactured from smaller, faster growing trees than what is needed for solid wood planks. This means that instead of further depleting our old growth forests, we can use younger trees, which can then be quickly replaced. The environmental consequences to making the harvesting of wood flooring a renewable resource are considerable.
There will always be those who prefer solid wood over an engineered product. For many it is a romantic notion that wants to cling to the past. What most people do not realize, however, is that engineered wood has been around for a lot longer than they think. More than 5,000 years ago, resourceful Egyptian builders had devised a method for attaching a high quality layer of wood over some lesser attractive variety. Hardwood was scarce and expensive to come by in that part of the world, so, once again, necessity was the motivator for the creation of an entire industry.
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