Wooden Floors!

[Kangabok]

We are a a stage where we need to put wooden floors in our house. After lots of research and speaking to salesmen we are even more confused.

Hubby likes solid timber - I like it to but can not justify the costs.

Any advice on solid vs engineered flooring? what type of wood? to glue or not? to float or not?

The floor will go down on bare concrete; we have no kids but pets.

Please help!

[Mara]

A lot would depend on the pets, dogs or cats? If cats, no problem, however, if it is dogs, mmmm, wooden floors get scratched, dogs have weight and nails, the two do not actually go together, too well.

As to which to use, I also think it is confusing, but then someone said something to me that made quite a lot of sense. Have a look at the period for which they guarantee it, the longer the guarantee, the better lasting it should be.

The best of course is if you do not have a concrete floor and then use the proper timber flooring, but in your case that is not an option.

[NotLookingBack]

Have a look at bamboo flooring. It is harder than most hardwoods, and looks stunning. It comes with the clicklock system, so it is easy peasy to lay, and you just put a decent foiled underlay (we got our underlay for $1-50/sqm) on top of the concrete floor.

We have bamboo (our house is almost ready for us to move in!), not on concrete as we built on stumps, but friends have theirs on concrete, and they are over the moon. It looks gorgeous.

By the way - shop around on ebay - don't go for the closest flooring company just because they are 'just down the road', as you can get really good prices if you shop around.

It took days and days of driving around all over Melbourne and surrounds (and many 100s of kms!) doing floor hunting (we started out wanting to do laminate flooring because of the cost factor) - but I just couldn't find anything that I really liked that was also thick enough (9mm or thicker is the best). So we moved our sights to hard wood (found spotted gum at a really good price), but when you add the cost of having it sanded and varnished to the bill, it becomes a huge mission and not so affordable anymore.

In the end we eventually decided to look at bamboo as the cost would be the same as the cheaper hardwood, but without the schlep of laying it, and we are SO chuffed that we never did the laminate flooring! But you have to shop around, as bamboo can be even more expensive than some hardwood flooring!

Enjoy your floor hunting