I have been planning to put in some hardwood floor, so I went to Lowe’s to check it out. There, the salesman told me that I can’t get hardwood because my house is on a concrete slab. He recommended laminate or bamboo instead.
Is it true that I can’t get hardwood? (There was one type of hardwood he said I could get but it was really thin and looked shitty.)
Is bamboo any good? Is it as durable? I have little kids who are going to beat the crap out of this stuff.
You can get “Engineered” hardwood floors - they are a fairly thin veneer laminated with plywood. Some of these are designed to “float,” so they could be easily installed over concrete. I have Engineered Oak floors in my kitchen, and they have held up very well over 16 years.
I put Bamboo in my living room. I was beautiful, but our Lab couldn’t walk on it, so we removed it and put in slate. Bamboo is very hard, but it will scratch, so I wouldn’t recommend it for homes with big dogs. Oak or other hardwood is actually softer, but it’s usually more textured, so it tends to hide small scratches better. If I was going to do it again, I’d get Cork - it’s really durable, and very comfortable to walk on.
While I’m not a house-builder, I have looked at letting companies build my house, and never heard this. Here, houses are either put on a concrete slab, or a pit is dug for a cellar, which most often will have a concrete ceiling (because pouring concrete is quicker and therefore cheaper than laying bricks).
The only way his comment makes sense to me is that you can’t lay wood directly on concrete, you need a backing (a lattice structure), so it can expand and won’t rot.
Don’t know about bamboo, but laminate has the advantage of being cheap and the disadvantage of not lasting long (esp. considering point 2).
Although, considering that the average time of house ownership in the US seems to be 5 years, laminate may be good enough for you.
I don’t know that store, but if they have no solid hardwood planks for people who want them, it’s not a good store, and I would look elsewhere. If you have kids and plan on staying in that house for 15-20 years, then I would invest in a solid hardwood floor made from planks. There are different ways to lay them.
The most important difference worth the price is that when the wood gets scuffed - which it inevitably will, esp. with kids - with laminate you’re lucky if you can sand* it down once; then you have to replace it again, which costs money.
With full beams or thick planks, you can sand it down several times, because there’s so much thickness to take away from.
Our house is on a slab and we were told we could get red oak but not white oak. It was the screwiest thing I ever heard but we were told this independently by at least four different flooring dealers.
It is correct. The machine used is called a floor sander.
Concrete holds moisture and that’s bad for hardwood. That’s all. You can install hardwoods if you put down a subfloor that will protect the hardwood from moisture.
White oak is much less water-permeable than red oak and would tend to trap any moisture seeping up through the slab, causing rot.
YMMV. My laminate came with a 25-year warranty.
You can’t generally install the classic style of wood flooring on a slab, they are strips nailed in with hundred of nails, not ideal for lasting with direct contact to concrete or any installation because concrete doesn’t take or hold nails well.
Engineers woods would be your next best bet, it can be installed as a glue down or floating. Engineered wood is generally a plywood composite with an 1/8th inch of real wood making up the top layer. It will look and behave like real wood because it is. It can be refinished multiple times, in the same way a traditional wood floor can. A traditional wood floor simply has more thickness so can be refinished more times.
If I was in your position with younger children I’d probably just go with a lower cost laminate and not get too upset if the kids destroy it over the next 15 years. Then after your rid of them pick something you’d like to retire with. The laminates available now are pretty impressive and they tend to be quieter then real wood.
I have Pergo in one part of the house and recently installed bamboo in another part of the house. The bamboo is glued down and I hear it pop when I walk on it and sometimes feel part of a plank sink down when I step on it. The Pergo is not attached to the concrete (“floating”) has scratches on it from chairs sliding around, but it is smooth and does not pop or sink down. If I want to change the bamboo, I’ll have to worry about getting up the “glue”. The bamboo is pretty, and a renewable resource, but I wish I had gotten more Pergo.
We have two different Pergo floors on our first floor. One that was there with the house, that has a marble like appearance…that stuff wears like nothing else…I don’t think I’ve seen a single blemish in that floor. The other is in our living room and dining room, and I installed that three and a half years ago…it’s got a redwood look with long thin individual planks…it’s a lot smoother and more formal than the other floor. I have ONE gash in it in the corner, where I accidentally knocked over a 4 lb vase that was thick walled glass that came to a sharp edge (kind of oval shaped, but with sharp points at the edges)…it put a 1 inch gash through the floor, but it’s in an inconspicuous place, and had it been hardwood, I’m sure a huge gash would be in the hardwood. Other than that it looks absolutely brand new. We don’t have big dogs, but we have two cats with claws who go skittering across it regularly , as well as an active 3 year old…not a scratch. Pergo carries between a 25 year to 35 year warranty, depending on the series.
I put down a bamboo floor a few years ago. I love it. The finish is a mirror gloss, and it has held up very well. My cats have no trouble walking running, fighting and playing murder on it. It is very hard. Indeed one of the hardest woods available (although not technically a wood.)
Unsurprisingly most of the bamboo flooring comes from China, and it does seem that you get what you pay for. There are variations in quality, and the cheaper stuff tends to have lower quality. It is obviously an engineered flooring material being laminated up from strakes cut from bamboo stalks. The homogeneity of the product is important. Just like any ply, ensuring that the inner layers are void free and of the same charateristics as the top layer greatly improves the resistance to warping. It have seen some cheap bamboo flooring materials that had very depressing quality, with the inner layers clearly made up from the dregs of the product.
You can get deeper colours of bamboo, these are not as hard as the blonde, but are still pretty hard.
I have put in bamboo throughout my house except for kitchen and bathrooms. We put it in the original (1955) house and the extension I built in 2002-2003. It is 5/8ths inch tongue and groove put in over linoleum on top of plywood. It is very beautiful. I chose the dark bamboo rather than the blonde. They advertise the darker color as “carbonized”, but if you are drilling in a corner, you can tell by the smell that the sugars in the wood were caramelized rather than carbonized. I am sure the termites would love it if they could get to it.
It seems to wear well. We put it in five years ago and there are not a lot of noticeable scuffs or scars. I have had one refrigerator melt-down on top of it with no disasterous results to the floor. We have found a single plank with an internal void. I haven’t replaced that one yet.
We have a small dog. She seems to be able to get around on it OK. But she knows that if you are playing tug-of-war and you get her off the rug and onto the bamboo, she will lose. So when she gets to the edge of the rug, she makes an extra effort to stay on the rug.
I wrote a script which I keep near the front door which I give to visitors to read out loud when they come to the house. The script extolls the beauty of the bamboo floor and the genius of the home owner (me) who installed it. My wife hates the script. She hates it so much that my children, in sympathy, have hidden the script numerous times.
Here is the script:
" Um, nice floor. I can see that it is done with the care of an actual home owner rather than just someone you could hire. The pags are all less than 7/137th of an inch. What the hell is a pag ? Oh, the ***gaps *** are all less than 7/137ths of an inch. But that’s just because wood is not a perfectly shaped material. It is not something to be blamed on the workman but rather on the material.
I like the way he reversed direction when he reached the bathroom door, changing from starting left to starting right so that he could make the end strip under the bathroom door take the tongue of the t and g. That was very elegantly done.
I can see that the flooring is not exactly square with the wall in the bedroom which means that the bedroom wall is not square with the rest of the house, but that is something that you should blame on theat damned drunken framing carpernter rather than the damned drunken flooring installer.
The wood filler is definitely as close a match as it is humanly possible to get (except in the closet which was just a test of a different color).
And even though the book and the Porta-nailer video said to do the last six rows by face nailing, I notice that your flooring installer figured out how to blind nail three rows and then only face nail three rows. This looks much better.
And I notice that the floor doesn’t squeak unless someone who weighs at least (insert your weight here) pounds walks on it."
I, of course, was both the damned drunken framing carpenter and the damned drunken flooring installer. I hope that any of the above helps you.
Jon
There are different grades of bamboo. Ask a flooring person (not a random employee) to show you what grade it is.
Carpenter and builder here, just want to second the recommendation that you go to a well respected and established local flooring supplier and talk to them. Sometimes the guy in the flooring department at Lowes or where-ever actually knows something but I wouldn’t count on it. Go where you can see a wide selection of possible flooring materials and find one that suits your needs.
Most laminate is crap but some is quite good; engineered hardwood is often an upgrade from solid hardwood (less movement), plus there are all sorts of flooring products like composite tile, Marmoleum, Fiber Floor, cork, epoxy coatings, Acid wash, etc that work well on concrete and might serve you very well.
