Solid vs. Engineered Hardwood Floors. What's the Difference?

what's the difference between solid wood floors and engineered wood floors let's find out today on smith house howdy y'all it's jordan smith make sure you go check out mtcopeland.com for all kinds of in-depth training videos our goal with mt copeland is to have the best instructors teaching the most up-to-date and technically accurate information which will help take somebody from apprentice who knows nothing about the trades through journeyman all the way through mastery of the subject today we're over at millennium hardwood floors in austin texas this is where i get my hardwood floors from this is hashtag not sponsored stefan has stephan stephen i always want to say staphon stefan if you call here he'll pick up um he's a great guy but this is not sponsored hasn't given me a dime for this i just needed somewhere that i could come in and talk about great hardwood floors and this is where we're at so what is the difference between a solid hardwood floor and an engineered hardwood floor is there a quality difference is there a pricing difference and is one higher quality than the other we'll answer all of those first let's jump in to just the thicknesses and the advantages and disadvantages on each one this is a solid piece of hardwood flooring and it's a very thick like three quarter inch thick not quite maybe 5 8 thick hardwood floor and it's a high quality product this is what we've been putting in houses for hundreds of years it's got a milled tongue and it's got a milled groove and they go tongue to groove and you can floor a complete house and it's going to be very solid very stable and last a very long time however when we first started putting this type of floor in our homes what kind of subfloor did we have we had a wood subfloor in fact if you back up to the first hardwood floors they weren't even planks like this they were actual structural members that were put in between joists you would just walk on the hardwood floor well those are expensive and hard to come by nowadays a full thickness of a hard wood like this oak so we've started making them thinner and we did the tongue and groove to give them stability but we are still putting them on wood subfloors today especially here in the south 99.9 of the homes are built on concrete slab foundations and you cannot glue this directly on a concrete slab foundation asterix you cannot glue this on a concrete foundation if you're me the glue manufacturers have changed some of their recommendations just a few years ago there was no glue manufacturer that would say that you could glue down a hardwood floor directly on a slab nowadays they say oh we've changed formulations and you can i'm still a skeptic because you have all kinds of problems with moisture coming up through that slab but now you have a vapor retarder in your glue that you're using for example but you still have to deal with condensation especially when you're laying it if you have a cold slab in a high humidity environment that's warmer the moisture will will condensate on the slab you install it and that moisture has nowhere to go except for into the wood eventually it will dry up through but will it dry up through without this expanding enough to start popping the floor off the glue i don't know i would not recommend this directly on a slab i would put a three-quarter inch subfloor plywood subfloor on top of the concrete and then your engineered wood well that adds a lot of expense because you've got the expense of your floor and you've got the expense of the plywood and it adds a lot of thickness now we're like an inch and five-eighths or an inch and three-quarter thick once it's all said and done what if we combined the plywood subfloor with the effective thickness of this floor this is where you come in with an engineered floor on a good engineered floor we have a plywood substrate and then our top layer our wear layer is the type of wood that we want to see and that we want to interact with in this case it is a custom rift cut walnut very nice floor here we still have the tongue we still have the groove but the tongue in the groove is all made into a much cheaper plywood than this rift walnut it would be cost prohibitive this is a very expensive floor in engineering format we're talking like 18 above 15 for sure if you try to do this in solid wood i don't know i really don't know 36 50. i mean you're talking about a very expensive per square foot floor just cost prohibitive for sure you can do this with engineered because all of the stuff that you really don't care about is plywood plywood has two advantages first it's cheap like i talked about second it's more stable because now we have the plies of wood going both this way and then the next layer is cross with it and then crossed and crossed across we have a much more stable platform as these wood grains expand and contract they're expanding and contracting 90 degrees to one another and it locks it in and makes a really strong substrate for this floor and then you have your substrate locked in and you have the same effective wear layer of the walnut on top this here is a five millimeter wear layer that means that i can have several sanding sanding and refinishing before i have to replace this floor this has about a five millimeter wear layer before we hit this tongue right or before we we can no longer sand beyond this anymore we don't want to go all the way to the tongue on sanding and refinishing because you'll have this cracking out as you're walking across it so you still have to stay several millimeters above this tongue so there's only so far that you can sand this floor even though it is all a solid wood the effective wear layer is the same on a solid wood floor as a high quality engineered floor the other advantage to this is because we have plywood on the bottom we can glue it directly down to the slab and we're not having to worry about moisture we can also have a thinner finished floor so we don't have to take up so much of our head room by our floor coming up we don't have to have crazy base and moldings and trims that will accept an inch and a half floor this comes down as a 5 8 thick floor and that's all that we have it's a very simple way to install it and you have all of the plethora of decisions that you want with a unfinished version like this so this is an unfinished engineered floor i can put whatever stain i can put whatever finish i can go crazy and it acts just like walnut because it is raw walnut however one of the advantages to an engineered floor is that you can get them pre-finished this here i believe this is a hickory mountain brown red oak mountain brown red oak this is the engineered version this is the solid version you see that they're the same this one's thinner but the effect of wear layer is almost as much on this version you can get it as much if you wanted but in this case it's almost as much on this version and you see that they look exactly the same and that's because the way that this is cut is on a sawmill cutting the tree into slabs this is cut on a sawmill cutting the tree into slabs but now we're able to cut those slabs much thinner which means we get more slabs per tree so this is a much more environmentally green i don't know it's just it's a better use of our resources we can get more flooring out of fewer hard to find trees than if we made the whole thing out of a hard to find tree because this plywood we can make out of plantation grown anything i mean just pine or larch or who cares what this is it'll depend on which region the plywood came from but it's just these plantation grown trees this pretty stuff this hard stuff this good stuff on the top is really what we want to conserve and we're able to get a lot more of it out of it in fewer trees with an engineered product now i will say there are not bad engineered products although there are bad engineered products there are lower quality engineered products on the market and you got to make sure that you understand what you're buying i'm not telling you what to buy one way or the other but on the very low end of the market we have this is a one millimeter wear layer they make even lower than that on the thickness and that's just super thin basically just painted on veneer and you see this grain here you see how this knot is really drawn and skewed out that's because this isn't a linear cut getting a slab out of a tree this is actually a rotary cut so we're spinning the tree we're basically think of a potato in a potato pill or you know the potato spinning and you put a peeler on it and it's shooting that peel off that's what this is you're shooting that off and you get a lot of veneer out of a single tree because you're just taking off very little but it doesn't look like a traditional solid wood floor you can definitely tell that this is engineered just because of the grain pattern it doesn't mean it's a bad product if you get a i wouldn't go under a two millimeter wear layer two millimeters is going to be a good solid floor you're going to get 25 years of service out of it you won't be able to refinish it but 25 years is a very long time to get on the floor thinner than that and you're probably going to end up having some issues in a shorter amount of time and you still can't refinish it so then you're looking at replacing the whole thing anything between three four and five and i may be getting my millimeters ex you know my exact millimeters off but somewhere between three and up you can refinish and then six is sort of the top end so somewhere between three and six is where i recommend to shoot for if you're wanting to refinish it and you're going to be able to refinish that just as much as solid flooring but what you can do with engineered that you cannot do with solid wood other than glue onto a slab is you can get monster this is a european white oak wide plank it is nine and a half inches wide um almost ten feet long it's a very long plank very wide plank and you can get this you know the sky's the limit you can go up to like 16 foot from the mill on this as big as the tree because again they're slicing these veneers off of the length of the tree so as long as the tree is we can get a plank that is that wide and that long but because we have a engineered backing behind it here we have all the stability and we can go wide without it trying to cup or bow you just couldn't do this in solid wood and this is a very on trend floor white oak is going crazy european white oak is a little bit wider than american white oak and so you can get those scandinavian whites and grays you can also if you want a darker floor this is a cool one here where we have the same white oak on the top but this is actually fumed so it's put in a chamber and it's filled with some sort of smoke that actually darkens the whole thickness of the wood so that you don't have to worry about the finished chipping because you get color throughout now you'll get some slight variation in finish on the top but give it some time and it will re-oxidize and it will blend right in again speaking of finishes you the sky's the limit on what finishes you want to get on your engineered wood anything that you can do on a solid wood you can do on an engineered wood if you've followed the channel for a while you know that i'm a big fan of bone natural it's a very low sheen it's nearly just like there's raw wood but it doesn't stain and it doesn't get all the oils soaking in it's a great product all of this in this room these two long ones are the bona natural product you can get a aluminum oxide finish as well especially on the lower end products i'm not a huge fan of the aluminum oxide finish i've noticed that lately they've been they've been coming out with a lower sheen aluminum oxide which is a really good thing because in the past they were just really high sheen and they felt really plastic in my opinion they still feel sort of plastic they just don't have that same feel if you have the opportunity to go into a high-end wood store and feel the differences between a bona natural and a aluminum oxide finish i highly recommend it because it's going to it's going to give you those subtle that i don't know it's just it's just a subtle change but when it's on your whole floor you can really see it thanks so much for watching i hope this helped i hope you understand more now about the differences between solid hardwood and engineered hardwood my preference is engineered nearly every time in fact i can't remember in the last five years when i haven't done an engineered hardwood floor because i get all of the benefits and there's really no downside to it in my opinion comment below if you disagree what is your favorite floor and why subscribe if we've earned it like the video if you liked it go check us out at jordansmithbuilds at instagram smithhouseco at instagram mt.copland at instagram go check out millennium hardwood floors they're on instagram and other things they got cool stuff they do installs too and it's always fun to follow and see what people are doing in some high-end homes here in austin go check them out thanks so much for watching we'll see you next time on smith house [Music] you

Channel: Jordan Smith

Views: 42,661

Rating: 4.9088321 out of 5

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Id: A7qLkZNN4FQ

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020