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Who know about hardwood floor?

Depends on the finish. Nice thing about finishing your own wood, you can decide your finish. You can triple coat if you like. Of course it cost more.

Prefinished wood, you have to like the finish.

I went for the engineered wood myself. Mine has some proprietary finish the manufacturer called "rhino finish." If I'm installing, I like the pre-finished wood. If I was paying, I'd get the pre-finished wood. But that's just me. :)
 
If you go with a pre-finished wood basically you can expect everything to be more or less done with machine precision (because quite honestly most all of them are done by machine :D), overall it's way less work that way. Don't think they'd necessarily "last longer" though.

Pergo is a brand name, and that brand is an engineered wood floor product.
 
You can sand pre-finished wood if it's real wood. Most of the ones I liked were 3/4" thick (top to bottom)

My engineered wood has 1/8" real wood (on the surface) so it can be sanded, but not too much. It sits on top of layered "engineered" wood (looks like layers of ply) that resist expansion, moisture, etc. It is about 1/2 " thick.

Pergo is actually a "laminated wood." A photograph of wood sits on top layers of wood and/or fiberboard. The surface is not real wood, so you can't sand it.
 
It's been a while since I've priced wood, the good stuff I REALLY like always is expensive as sh*t, but Pergo was not one of the cheaper alternatives IIRC.
 
Brand name engineered wood would be pricier than Pergo. There several types and quality for engineered wood, so you can find some priced about the same even less (on sale items) as Pergo.

Pergo is a brand name laminate and is not the cheapest "wooden floor" you can get. Costco sells laminate floors that are less.

My own test for flooring is how it sounds when I tap it. Tap the real hardwood floors (these are solid wood all throughout) and the engineered wood then the laminates. The denser the sound, the better I like it - unfortunately the denser ones always seemed costlier.
 
I lived in a house that had real hard wood floors for about 20 years.. had to sand them once every other year and refinish them. I also lived in a house that had pergo floors for about 12 years. never once had to sand or refinish them. I figure the money we spent on sanding and refinishing, we could have replaced our pergo a couple times. So make sure you take into consideration the maintenance costs when purchasing floors...

another thing though... if you scratch hard wood flooring, it can be sanded out or restained.... if you scratch pergo, you have to replace that piece.. which is time consuming.

if it were my house, my floor, id go pergo over real hard wood. easier to maintain.


*when i say pergo, i mean any laminate wood flooring...kinda like when you all say plexi-glass aquarium instead of acrylic*
 
We install all types of flooring in my business, one of the interesting things is ALL the florring contractors I work with install laminates in their own homes becasue of the durablity.
 
Bamboo is very cool looking but IMO a bad choice, you will never find a lot that matches another, so if you happen to need a replacement board it will never match. If you go with bamboo get extra boards
 
Thanks everyone for the feedback. I will go and check out the floor and kitcken cabinet today.

I don't think my wife like Bamboo floor too much. They are kinda expensive too. We might have to go with Pergo because of the limited budget :( ..
 
Bamboo looks nice, but unless they've changed the sealants to give it a super hard coating recently it is a bad choice for kids/people/animals/etc. Basically its very soft and scratches really easily. If you have it, you'll need to institute a no-shoes rule in the house, which my g/f has been trying to do with me but ummm I like wearing shoes!
 
I don't know how everyone feels about saving the envirment but if you are in favor of it, do not buy bamboo floors. Reason being that since it grows so fast and can be exported as flooring etc a lot of hardwood forest have been cut down and replanted with bamboo, effectively making a crop that those counties can harvest year after year..............
 
Yeah the store said the samething about easy to scratch Mike.

There is a no-shoes rule in my house doesn't matter what kind of floor we have :bigsmile: ..
 
Hi Phong

Check the following website Simplefloors.com They have reasonable pricing. They also have a store in San Jose, Oakland and in San Francisco.
 
Thanks Gus!! They do have pretty good price :)

What kind of thickness do you think is good enough? There are 8.3mm, 10.3mm and 12mm. Of course the thicker is better but do I really need that thick? 8.3mm cost about $.99 to $2.00 SF. 12mm cost double the 8.3mm.

I'm planning to install this by myself to save some $. Labor cost about $2.5 per sf. for laminate flooring, about $6.5 for tile and $7 for unfinished hardwood.

I also planning to install the kitchen cabinet myself. That would save me about $1500. Wondering how hard it is to install that. I can take my time since I don't have a job now. The only thing I don't think I can do myself is the counter. I don't have anything to cut the granite. For some reasons, I don't think dremel and diamond wheel work too well J) ..
 
When I did my kitchens, Home Depot quoted me a price about 3x that of the cabinets for installation ($5000 worth of cabinets too!), they said "oh we need to get permits, etc etc" bullshi'ite! They just want to maximize their profits while they subcontract out to the lowest bidder.

The cabinets themselves are not terribly hard to install, screw a board to the wall that's level and the height of your cabinets, then just rest them all on top of that, and screw them into the wall, then remove the board. You will need at least another set of hands to do it though.

For the countertop, yeah let them install it, great thing about HD for that is their prices per sqft of granite are installed prices.
 
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