If you can go with a 3/4" solid, Hosking Hardwoods has a great price on their prefinished white oak (White Mountain brand). We just got ours delivered today and the quality looks excellent - long board lengths, even coloration, tight grain.

Having once installed a 3-strip engineered, I would never again install a multi-strip floor. Quite simply, you can see the seams, both long-way and short-way where the pieces come together, and it just doesn't have the same look single-strip floors have.

Thanks, sweeby. I respect your take on things so I am glad to hear that you don't like 3-strip either. Thanks for the headsup on the Hosking hardwoods--great deal! We have the solid now and I'd love to find a *square edged* prefinished...although I know that would be almost impossible, which is why I was looking at the engineered. I may order a sample of it anyway, to see how micro the bevel is...what's your thought on the size of the bevel?

A question: if you could get a square-edged engineered prefinished *single plank* w/a not-so-thrilling but not horrible 4 mm wear layer (Teka brand), vs. the Hosking hardwoods oak with the microbevel edges (I know they have square sides), what would you think about the Teka?

side note re the floors: I'm especially excited about them because I'm going to mosaic the stair risers when we put oak on the treads :) It's much more fun to think about that part of it, but I do have to do this part too :)

Owens has a number of advantages over solid. It can be used over radiant heat, is more dimensionally stable, has longer lengths than most solid.

Chris

If your existing white oak floor is solid 3/4" and you will have no height issues using 3/4" in the new area, then do the solid (if it will be going over a wood subfloor).

Search this forum for ideas on how you can acquire this professioinal use only product and what is involved in learning to apply it and with what tools. Just be reasonable with any results you get. A company like Bonakemi doesn't want calls from DIYers who screw up the work by failing to follow instructions and then try to blame the professional use product for their failure to get good results.

No point in listing information here, as a simple search will give you all you may need to know and then some.

Oh! And! Try to match the grade and sawing of your white oak, so it comes close to the look you already have with the existing.

My take on the bevel size is that it's not bad. I've seen many in some flooring lines that I wouldn't tolerate, and these are among the better half of the bevel spectrum. Yes, you can tell it's there -- and if the boards were short and wide, I'd have a problem with it. But for me, longer board lengths and tighter graining were more important.

Of course, if you can site finish, that does look better. For us, it simply wasn't possible without all of us camping out on the living room floor and not showering for a week. Well - let's just say it wasn't possible. ;-)

prefinished with aluminum oxide has a wear layer that can't be duplicated by site sanded flooring. Why you would buy unfinished eng is more of a matter of design. Perhaps a consumer would want a custom stain etc. If your going with a standard color prefinished has it all over site finished in terms of durability. Read all the posts on here regarding, air bubbles etc. There are always tradeoffs re: beveled edges and overwood etc.

It gets lost on people at times, but solid, 2 1/4" square edge 4-sides, prefinished flooring is still available. Bruce has Fulton strip, Bayport strip and another one I can't remember right off.

One has to ultra sensitive to getting the substrate as slat as possible when installing this. About half of my solid jobs are going with a square edge product.

My take on engineered "solid wood" flooring is that it's an overblown term to describe a lower quality product than can be created by any local sawmill. It's basically plywood with a thin layer of decent wood on the top. The one good thing I can find about it is that it uses resources that otherwise would be wasted, and it save trees. So it has environmental benefits, partially. On the other hand, the plies are glued together with adhesives. I don't know what glues are used, but I'd bet they're environmentally offensive and will offgass in your home. (another "green" conundrum.) There might be specific conditions under which the plywood's greater stability is useful, but in most cases, real wood will stand the test of time better.

I was looking at some yesterday and it's several layers of junk wood with a very thin layer of hardwood on top. We've installed solid wood floors all over our house ourselves. It's one of the more doable projects for a homeowner with modest skills. I wouldn't buy a brand name, I'd find a quality small business that mills the boards. I'd ask about the length of the boards, whether the boards are end matched (cut at a 90 degree angle so you don't have to cut each one while installing), the color consistency and the knots. A high quality floor has nice board lengths (few in the 2 to 4' range, and some being 8 and 10'), consistent coloration of the boards and few, if any, knots. Oh, and 3/4" thickness. Most of the flooring you see these days, especially by brand name, will contain lots of short boards with varying color. When laid, what you see is a choppy floor.

There are good and easy-to-use sanders that you can rent that have a flat bottom and don't gouge the floors. They put out surprisingly little dust, visibly, anyway. I'm not sure about finishes, but research might turn up some tough ones that aren't as toxic as the typical polyurethanes.

I don't know the age of your current white oak floor, but if it's an older one, I think this is the best way to match it. It's also the best quality wood floor, imo.

BTW, there's a lot of confusing terminology in the wood flooring world, no doubt intentional. Using the word "solid" to refer to engineered wood is a little tricky. Or "hardwood". The samples I saw yesterday looked like they consisted of layers of fir or whatever plywood is made of, and that's a so-called softwood. If you can't use the word "solid" to distinguish a board sawn from a tree, I don't know what you're supposed to call it.

I think your msg is a little misleading. The plies of engineered floors are using species specific to the species of wood based on the stability of the species used. At Bruce many products had different type of wood used. 3 5 or 7 ply products were used for stability reasons. The above poster like many of you are basing a buying decision on a factor that may have little to do with your happiness with your floor. Solid has always been the standard in flooring. Engineered has gained a lot due it stability and its ability to install on grade concrete etc. There isn't one size fits all in the flooring industry.

I'm a curmudgeon and I have a bias for natural materials. I admit I was making an assumption when I used the term "junk wood". What I saw was layers of wood, the quality of which could never be used in visible areas. It may be, as Boxers said, that the sublayers are chosen for stability. I did say there may be situations where the stability of plywood is useful. But for above-grade applications, unless there are extreme cycles of humidity and drought, I don't think stability is that big an issue. At least in my experience, and I've lived with solid wood floors in parts of the country with extreme climate differences.

As an amateur woodworker, I do have a bias against plywood. I see it as inferior to solid wood. If it gets gouged, there'll be a hole that reveals something different underneath. Real solid wood is almost infinitely refinishable and reusable. (We tore down 300 sq. ft. of wood from an old ceiling and have found lots of ways to reuse it. Look at old barn wood that's now finding a second life as vintage flooring. ) With engineered wood you're paying for something that can't be refinished more than once or twice. Then you have to throw it into the landfill and pay for a new floor. That's why I call it an inferior product.

As far as being able to use it over radiant heating, you can use either one. But wood is never the best choice of flooring over radiant heat. If it's solid wood, it will tend to shrink from the heat, and the finish will become more volatile, increasing the rate at which the VOCs are released into your air. Ditto for engineered wood, with the layers of glue.

But if you take a little care of it, and rescreen it when necessary, you'll never get down to the bare wood, so never have to sand it.