Picking a floor is much harder than I thought it would be. I thought the choices were pretty basic, do you want tile, carpet, luxury vinyl planks (LVP), hardwood, or engineered hardwood. Unfortunately, that is just the beginning of the journey and we were able to quickly eliminate carpet and quickly decided on tile in the bathrooms, laundry room, and pantry. We were rolling right along and now the next choice would be the flooring for the rest of the house. Would it be LVP, solid hardwood, or engineered hardwood? After a bit of research and talking with some experts we were able to eliminate solid hardwood because we wanted planks that are wider than what we can get with solid hardwood and we can’t put solid hardwood down on the first level because you can’t install it on concrete so that just left LVP or engineered hardwood.
Our Choice
We spent some time going to different flooring stores and talking with some of our friends and finally landed on engineered hardwood. You probably can’t go wrong with either choice, but we like the feel of real wood versus vinyl.
Now that we made our choice, our research into all the different types of engineered hard manufacturers and types has begun. When looking at the different brands and collections from each manufacturer, we learned we need to know what the core is made of, the thickness of the wear layer, the thickness of the board, and the width of each board.
Core: This is the middle of the board and what helps the engineered hardwood remain stable. For this, we want something that has a nice plywood core with 8 or more plys
Wear Layer: This is one of the most important aspects of engineered hardwood. This is the top of the board and the thickness determines if you can resand and refinish the board in the future. This also goes to the longevity of the product at well. For this category, we want boards that have a 3mm or 4mm wear layer.
Thickness: For this category, we are looking at boards that are 1/2″ or 3/4″ thick
Width: This category is just for personal preference. We want something that is bigger than traditional hardwood, but not gigantic. We believe our sweet spot is around 6″ to 8″. We have seen some boards that are 9.5″ in real life and we just think they are a bit too wide for our tastes.
In a future post, I’m going to list all the manufacturers we are interested in and start narrowing down their collections and colors. One of our challenges is the fact we are currently in Colorado and building in South Carolina and not all manufacturers are available in both places. This makes it hard to see their products.
Current Colors
Hallmark Floors has a great option where you can take a picture of a room and then see what the hardwood looks like in that room. I used that feature to see what the colors we are interested in look like in our current house to get an idea of what we like. After looking at the colors, here are the ones we kind of narrowed down to.
Hallmark Marina
Collection Name: Ventura
Color: Marina Oak Hardwood
Width: 7.5″
Species: European Oak
Structure: Engineered Slice Cut
Hallmark Del Mar
Collection Name: Alta Vista
Color: Del Mark Oak Hardwood
Width: 7.5″
Species: European Oak
Structure: Engineered Sawn Cut
Hallmark Orange Blossom
Collection Name: True
Color: Orange Blossom
Width: 7.5″
Species: American Hickory
Structure: Engineered Sawn Cut
Hallmark Morris
Collection Name: Grain & Saw
Color: Morris Oak
Width: 6″
Species: European Oak
Structure: Engineered Slice Cut
Hallmark Malibu
Collection Name: Alta Vista
Color: Malibu Oak Hardwood
Width: 7.5″
Species: European Oak
Structure: Engineered Sawn Cut
