What do I need to know about new wood floors?

[mommylamb]

DH and I want to put in new hardwood floors on our main level this spring. The main level (it's a 3 floor town house, so this is the middle floor), consists of a large kitchen/family room area that already has wood floors, an open concept living room and dining room that is currently carpeted, and a foyer that has wood floors that match the floor in the kitchen (but not attached to the kitchen). The whole area is about 950 sq ft.

Our options are:

1. Refinish the wood floors in the kitchen/family room and foyer and try to match the wood that's already there for the dining room and living room.

2. Get all new wood.

I'm sure option 1 is cheaper, and I imagine we would be able to match the wood because it's builder basic sort of stuff. But I'd really like to get a nicer looking wood that makes the house stand out a bit more (thicker planks, something a little darker and more interesting). Obviously, price does matter though. We are refinancing our house right now and will be getting some cash out of the deal, plus the cash from our current escrow account, and of course the savings from the refi, that we can put towards this project.

So, I'm looking for advice and anything I need to be aware of. DH and I know nothing about doing this. I'm not sure what kind of hard wood to look at, if subflooring is necessary in the carpeted areas, etc. I'm also not sure how much we should expect it to cost, what a good deal would be, etc. I know people love Lumber Liquidators, and their supply is large... which I find kind of intimidating. Do I choose a contractor first and have them get the wood for us? How does it work?

Sorry to sound clueless. I am.

[Giantbear]

what type of wood do you have down now? is it true hardwood or engineered? If it is true hardwood and has not been sanded much, i would sand the existing wood, lay the new wood and then stain and urethane everything at once. If you try and match the new to the old, you will never get a 100% match.

[hellokitty]

what type of wood do you have down now? is it true hardwood or engineered? If it is true hardwood and has not been sanded much, i would sand the existing wood, lay the new wood and then stain and urethane everything at once. If you try and match the new to the old, you will never get a 100% match.

:yeahthat:

Also, what color do you want your HW floor? I ask, b/c we have dark cherry Hw floor (oak), and while it looked beautiful when we first installed it, 3 kids later, there are a LOT of dents and knicks on it. I would advise a lighter color if you can, the dark HW floor shows a lot more dust and scratches, etc., and that is saying a lot, b/c we are a shoe free house, so it's not like the floors are getting damaged from shoes, it's from kids dropping toys.

[mommylamb]

I honestly have no idea. I think it's true hardwood, but it's original to the house and I'm not, so it was here when I moved in. I know it would need to be resanded/finished regardless because it has been bleached in some areas by the sun and you can see where a rug used to be under the kitchen table. Not pretty. Yet another reason why I'd like to pull it up and just put down new stuff entirely.

[BillK]

If you pull up the old flooring be prepared to possibly have to address any issues there - including maybe having to put down 3/4" ply for a good subfloor for the new wood. When we did it ours was so old the prior floor was installed on wooden "sleepers" (just long skinny hunks of wood spaced out every foot or so and of varying thickness and length - it would have been a nightmare to put new wood down over them). Ended up having to put 3/4" plywood down OVER the sleepers then nail the new hardwood over the ply.

Here's some pics of our "Character Grade" Hickory. It's taken a major beating and still looks like new - mainly because of all the color/grain variations that hide the nicks, dings and scratches. These are old shots from about 5 years ago.

http://btz.smugmug.com/photos/238434760_NEycj-M.jpg

http://btz.smugmug.com/photos/179165091_cuki6-M.jpg

Our wood came from Sheoga Flooring - http://www.sheogaflooring.com/ - I drove out and picked it up and had a hardwood installer put it down for me.

[L'sMommy]

A couple of things to consider based on our personal experience:


Sanding creates a LOT of dust - we sanded our oak floors before we moved into our current house. The dust is very fine and it rises. If you look carefully there is still dust in crevices in the house.
Real wood scratches and dents MUCH more easily than engineered wood. DS is literally "ruining" our brand new floors with his toys. At first I was freaking out about it but now I've accepted it.
Engineered wood holds up a lot better. Our old house had engineered wood and those floors took a beating with our dog and DS and still looked good when we moved out.

[zukeypur]

Hand scraped hardwood are also great at hiding knicks and such.

[twowhat?]

A couple of things to consider based on our personal experience:


Sanding creates a LOT of dust - we sanded our oak floors before we moved into our current house. The dust is very fine and it rises. If you look carefully there is still dust in crevices in the house.
Real wood scratches and dents MUCH more easily than engineered wood. DS is literally "ruining" our brand new floors with his toys. At first I was freaking out about it but now I've accepted it.
Engineered wood holds up a lot better. Our old house had engineered wood and those floors took a beating with our dog and DS and still looked good when we moved out.


Engineered hardwood still has a thin veneer of real wood on top of the engineered wood - but I think what makes it so durable is the aluminum oxide coating on it, which is very hard. Our new house has engineered hardwood in a wide plank so I can't say how well it will hold up - it'll take a few years for me to assess the wear:) So far though I haven't seen any new scratches come up, even with 2 dogs running around.

Also, ITA with pp who mentioned that darker floors show dirt, fur, dust a lot more. I would choose a lighter color for that alone! And some people think handscraped hardwood is hard to clean as dust/debris can settle into it.

eta: if you want this same floor in your kitchen, definitely go with engineered hardwood if you're going to replace the floor. It holds up to spills and higher humidity better than solid hardwood (won't warp), and that same aluminum oxide coating protects against water for years and years, even if it's scratched and dented.

[Giantbear]

engineered wood does hold up better, but it can only be sanded a few times to remove issues or re-stain while real wood can be sanded much more often. The dust does get everywhere, but after we brought in a professional cleaning crew and three months later don't see the dust anymore.

[KrisM]

Thanks for asking this! We have dark hardwoods in the dining room and entry and want to put hardwood in the kitchen and family room. They'll meet at 2 doorways. We're starting to look into what's easiest, cheapest, best, etc. I really dislike the dark color as it shows every speck of dust. It is never clean looking. It also has beveled edges that drive me nuts trying to keep them clean. I don't know how we'd contain the dust if we sand it down, but I think that is our plan. Sand those rooms, lay new floor of the same size plank, and finish it all at once.

[mommylamb]

This is all really helpful. So, it sounds like engineered is the way to go. I don't mind getting something that is medium dark. I just don't want it to look like the builders standard wood that we have right now.

ETA: What do you think of this: http://www.lumberliquidators.com/catalog/product.jsp?productId=7537

[Giantbear]

we stayed away from LL, read real bad reviews from people about warping wood and such. Our installer bought the wood from HD and then we went with a real light stain. Because the joists in our living room ran a different way than the kitchen and dining room, our living room boards are horizontal and our dining room and kitchen are vertical. we also used a lighter color for the kitchen, dining room.

[sariana]

Option 3?: Put a noticeably different colored wood floor in the new areas, and keep the wood floors you currently have. Don't try to "match."

[lucybabymamma]

Interesting thread! We just decided to put down new hardwoods and after much debating and research, decided to use the thicker, prefinished Brazillian Cherry and we DID buy it from Lumber Liquidators. There is a 100 year warranty on the wood we bought, and lots of people use them, so hopefully buying from them was a good choice....
http://www.lumberliquidators.com/catalog/product.jsp?productId=1544

Anyways, it was so hard to bite the bullet on a more expensive price, but we liked the durability of brazillian cherry and the idea of thick hardwoods (3/4 thickness) because then we could refinish more often and we plan to stay at our current house a long time. We bought prefinished wood because it looked more uniform to us (plus DH is doing it himself). Totally debated over such a dark color but since the prefinish was not very shiny and actually on desplay in a very high traffic area in the LL design room and looked okay, we went with it!

If you use a contractor, they may have a company that supplies their wood at a discount, so you may not need to buy the wood from a place like LL.

Soooo that said, it kind of depends on how long you want to stay at your house and your budget (expect a contractor to cost at least half your budget), but for longevity and resale, I think I would go for real hardwood. And, if you want to switch up the kind of wood, this project sounds like a good chance to start over (once you choose, this will probably be it for a long time), or if you like the wood, I would vote for matching it -- you can even restain it all another color. I think the same hardwood throughout looks nice and is a better investment.


We had a natural-colored Red Oak in our last house and it did not show dirt, had been there for 40 years and had gotten the treatment from us (toys dropped, dogs, shoes on, etc) -- it held up awesome, and when we refinished it, it looked great.

It is such a hard decision, we thought!!! Especially with all the choices and the cost....
Oh! A few more things we discovered:
* even if you don't buy from LL or HD, they have free classes on doing floors yourself (if someone in your house is handy)
* LL also had a magazine at their store that showed all the kinds of woods and the hardness of each of them (HD has signs that show this, too), which helped us in thinking about durability.
* Finally, when we were looking, we found that Home Depot had a really nice, thick, prefinished Hickory at only $2.99 sqft. We wanted a darker color, otherwise we would have gone with that:)