Laminate Flooring: The New “It”?
By Steve Lemke.
Much has been made about laminate flooring in recent years. Laminate flooring has become a very popular and cost effective alternative hardwood flooring. First we must understand what laminate flooring is. Laminate flooring is constructed by sandwiching a high density fiber board with a laminate backing and a high quality photo paper image of wood, stone, or other natural texture with a laminate top.
From a distance you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between a laminate plank floor and a hardwood floor, but upon closer inspection the differences become quite obvious. Laminate floors offer at most 6 distinctive grain pattens. When installed several planks may seem to match because they do. When installing a laminate it’s important to spread out the planks to prevent a duplicate from resting directly next to another duplicate. Hardwood on the other hand has varying grain patterns because it is constructed from real wood. The finish on laminate floors also tends to be more glossy and reflect more light than a hard wood floor.
Laminate floors often feature embossing as well. This is where small indentations are placed on the planks or tiles to reflect a more natural look, much in the same way as vinyl siding placed on a house. Hardwood floors character marks are naturally, more natural, they are spread out and have many different variations.
The key difference between laminates and hardwoods is durability softwoods such as pine tend to dent and ding easily, hardwoods like maple also will dent and ding but more force is needed to accomplish it. On the other hand across the board laminate floors are extremely durable and a large amount of force is needed to dent or ding the surface.
Maintaining a hardwood floor is slightly more difficult than a laminate floor because of dirt and dust build up near the edges and water staining is possible. Laminate floors however; tend to be very easy to clean by simply dust mopping and spot cleaning stains.
Installation varies greatly as well, the majority of hardwood floors in some form need to be bonded to the sub-floor by either nail-down, staple-down or glue-down installation. Laminate floors are installed using a “floating” method. This is where the laminate floor is not bonded directly to the subfloor, usually a type of underlayment is placed between the laminate floor and the subfloor to reduce sound and add some bounce when walking on it. Some laminate floors require the planks to be glued together while others don’t preferring to use a click and lock system. This means installing and uninstalling laminate floors is vastly easier than doing the same to a hardwood floor.
Is laminate flooring the new “it”? Only time will tell for certain but laminate flooring is becoming a very popular and economic flooring solution for people everywhere.
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Steve Lemke
Tags:How to clean hardwood floors,how to maintain hardwood floors
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