It’s time to work on our son’s room now, and we’re planning to install hardwood flooring. I went out tonight with my sister and my son to check things out.
Holy crap. I didn’t expect so many options. We brought home some samples to look at, but I have no idea what to look for. My husband and FIL will install it - they’ve done it before but are by no means experts. The room is fairly small - about 12 x 13.
What should I avoid? What are some things to look for? Google, here I come…
Three points:
Oh, two installation tips: you really need to make sure the substrate is level. Even a wood substrate needs to be leveled. The specs for my floor required less than 1/8 in difference from the highest to the lowest point on the entire floor. It took longer to level my slab than to install the floor. Make sure all the wood you buy comes from the same lot so the color matches and if any of the wood is warped (ours was), replace the entire lot and start over. It is a pain, but anything less will spell trouble for ever.
Enjoy!
Is your son’s room upstairs? If so, be prepared for more noise below his room- he’ll sound like a herd of elephants.
Laminate vs solid- often the sandable surface depth is the same, so you can feel more comfortable going with laminate (and it will be less expensive).
Floating floors shift and move a bit, even if you’ve leveled the floors. They are the easiest to install for civilians (we did our own) but next time we will go with glued or nailed-down floors. If you are doing it yourself, start somewhere invisible, like inside a closet. You will learn a lot and be much improved by the time you hit mid-room! 
You will need specialized tools, easily available at Home Depot-type places.
Doing it yourself saves a ton of money. We were looking at doing out whole downstairs- roughly 1000 sf. Installed- $15,000 at least; doing it ourselves- $4000 or so in materials. It was no contest.
When I say “laminate” I don’t mean Pergo or floors like that- I mean hardwood layered over other woods and pre-finished. Although I have friends who did Pergo and are perfectly happy with the result.
Hardwood floors scratch and wear, even the hardest woods- be ready. You can grade wood flooring products by their hardness (oak is pretty hard, pine is very soft), and if you expect high traffic or want it to last, go with the hardest wood you can find.
OTOH, the first scratch in a wooden floor is a (little) disaster; the thousanth is one more that adds character.
Also, what are the other floors in the house like? There’s no accounting for taste, but I feel a different floor material in each room looks a bit like a patch job, a quilt made with whatever was at sale at Home depot.
We had to take our lifestyle into account when we were deciding what kind to put in because at any given moment I have 4 or 5 pets that are hard on wood floors. In the end we decided to go with thicker, more rustic oak floors that look better with the house than fancier ones would have, and that the animals can scratch all they want and all it will take is a sanding and refinishing to clean them up.
I can’t speak to how my partner (who is a carpenter, among other things) installed it or what he did to the concrete floor below it but even when I do high-impact aerobics it feels solid. We spent about $1400 on lumber for a 24 by 16 room and he cut the tongue and grooves (?) himself.
We’re just in the process of installing a bamboo hardwood floor in our living room (the wood was free, so bamboo hardwood it is!). If the wood hadn’t been free, we would have gone with laminate, too. It is a very good product.
One hardwood installation tip I know is to season the wood in your own house before installing it. Don’t load it off the truck and start laying it down the next day - it needs to acclimatize to your particular house before it is all nailed together so it doesn’t acclimatize after (and warp and gap).
Yes! Give it at least a week, and longer if you can- my MIL had a shitload of hardwood stacked up in her living room for two weeks before installation!
Are you sure you want to do hardwood flooring in a bedroom? Hardwood floors are great. I love the look and feel. The whole first floor of our home is cherry stained hardwood flooring. I find it looks best in large open rooms where the light can play on it. There are some issues with traditional hardwood flooring:
First they get dusty fast. Carpeting catches and hides a lot of dust.
Second you’ll want area rugs that cover much of the room. If you don’t your furniture with scratch and mar the floor at it slides around on the floor.
Third they are cold the to the bare foot in winter. Not my favorite choice for bedroom flooring.
Fourth noise is an issue. If the floor is nailed to the substrate in about 4 years you’ll start to hear creaking that you can’t really fix.
Fifth nailing hardwood flooring into a second floor room may pop the drywall seams in the ceiling of the room below.
Considering all this I’d go with the Pergo type of flooring. It’s tougher than regular hardwood finishes, easier to install and can be set down on a pad or with a padded backing that reduces noise and insulates the floor. And you’ll have no nails to come loose and squeak later. And since it’s often cheaper than even pre-finished hardwood you won’t feel to guilty about covering it with an area rug.
Anybody have any info on the durability of bamboo? We did some window shopping this weekend for flooring, and the bamboo is lovely - and cheap!
We went with Bellawood for the first floor of our house. http://www.bellawood.com/?PIPELINE_SESSION_ID=37b875fe0ad48873009104778e098dbc
It is beautiful and comes with a warranty on the finish. We installed it ourselves and it wasn’t that hard to do, just time consuming. They have a number of finishes and woods to choose from and it was cheaper and better quality than the stuff at Home Depot.
Personally, I don’t like the feel of Pergo type laminate. You can tell it isn’t real wood and just feels “cheap” to me.
There’s lots of good advice in this thread. It sounds like a floating laminate floor would be a good option. I didn’t think about the fact that the noise level would increase or that a nail-down hardwoord floor would cause creaking and affect the drywall seams. The family room is directly below his bedroom, so that’s definitely a consideration.
He plays video games, watches TV, reads, and sleeps in his room. He doesn’t walk around a whole lot up there because the room is small. I’m planning to put a rug down, both for decorative reasons and to protect the floor. He does have some allergies, especially in the summer, so I’m hoping the lack of carpeting will help with that.
Sometime this year I’d like to get carpeting on the stairs, upstairs hallway, and in our daughter’s bedroom. The master bedroom carpeting is brown, and the rest will be a tan color - very neutral. Downstairs we have mostly tile, with carpeting in the family room and living room. I’d like to get hardwoord in the living room, but that can wait for now because we have kids and a dog. I think we’ll do that when it’s just DH and me so it won’t get trashed.
What brand names seem to be the best? The worst?
I think you can get serious underlay for the floor, too, if you want to reduce noise. That might only be an option for a floating floor, though.
We have all the carpet out of our main floor (including bedrooms) now, and I’m loving it. It seems like the linoleum we have now is virtually maintenance-free - I run the swiffer over it every two weeks or so (or whenever I notice the cat hair accumulating in the corners), and it always looks fine. The whole house seems to smell better, too. I like the idea of having no wall-to-wall carpets, just decorating with nice rugs (that can be cleaned properly and easily replaced).
Laminate isn’t that much cheaper. When we redid our kitchen/dining room a few years back, the price difference was only about 150 dollars. Also if there are any uneven bits on the subflooring, laminate may not be a good choice: we found that out the hard way when the flooring people came to install the laminate we’d ordered, said the dips were too substantial, and we needed to go with a nailed-in option. They could have filled in the dips, but wouldn’t warrantee (is that a word?) the floors if they did.
I disagree that hardwood is delicate - some of the finishes may get scratched but a) the underlying wood isn’t usually damaged, and b) the wood can always be refinished. Possibly spot repairs may be done, depending on the surface (a friend who has oiled hardwood rather than urethane simply sands / re-oils the spot). With laminate, it may not scratch as easily but if it does, you’re out of luck.
Hardwood generally adds to the value of the house. It is, however, cold to the bare tootsies. Area rugs are good for that (depends on your own dust issues; we didn’t put rugs in my daughter’s bedroom due to allergies).
We’re in the process of gradually replacing all the carpet in our house with hardwood as we can afford to do so. We’ve done 3 of the 4 bedrooms, and the family room; next up will either be the main hallway/stairs and guest bedroom, or the dining/living room.
I wouldn’t go for any really funky woods unless you really only plan to do a room or two. Otherwise you wind up having wood transitions (e.g. oak hallway with cherry bedroom), or having to do the whole house in that wood. If you’re genuinely doing just 1 room and don’t plan on doing others, then go for whatever wood you like - there are some very attractive varieties. We made the “mistake” of putting some lovely birch planks (wider boards) in our bedroom but will ultimately do oak in the rest of the house (kitchen/foyer were already oak) and that’ll be a bit odd.