Why Is Engineered Hardwood So Beneficial?
More and more Australian homeowners are opting for engineered flooring these days. When you obtain an engineered hardwood floor that has been properly installed by experts, it can make all the difference to your home. Hardwood needs to be sustainably sourced, however, in order to preserve the natural environment, particularly of tropical rainforests. That said, there are plenty of engineered flooring suppliers who can find ethically sourced woods for your floor. Therefore, if you are considering having one fitted in your home, what are the main benefits that you can expect?
Lower Cost of Materials
Compared to solid wood flooring, engineered hardwoods are much less costly because you simply need to buy less of it. This is because the way such hardwoods have been engineered to fit together means that it can often be thinner. It is always worth examining a hardwood panel for a solid floor and an engineered one from a sample to establish for yourself how you can lower your overall expenditure by purchasing less wood to cover the same footprint of floor space. In many cases, they are fitted over the top of a cheap plywood base, too. Since you'll never see it, using an inexpensive material like this simply means saving a few dollars for every square metre of flooring.
Indistinguishable Quality
Because solid hardwood floors are often seen as the highest quality that money can buy with all over the main flooring options — including tiles, laminates and carpets, to name a few — some people think that engineered flooring offers inferior quality. This is not the case. So long as it is fitted professionally, an engineered hardwood floor will be just as good as anything else you could install. Even people who fit such floors for a living cannot tell them apart from solid hardwood ones unless they pull them apart. Underfoot, the quality is immediately noticeable.
No Shifting or Settling
Because the profiles of engineered hardwood floor sections interlock with one another, they remain in place with very little problems. In fact, most owners find that they remain in exactly the same position years after they were fitted as they did on day one. They can even cope with minor spillages on them without warping, something that is a known problem with certain laminate floors, for example. This remains the case even if you suffer from high levels of humidity in your part of the country. Many people install engineered flooring in potentially wet places like utility rooms without any trouble whatsoever.