I am in a quandary here. House is a ranch, with front hall done in marble, back hall (bedroom wing) carpeted, carpeted steps leading up to den from front hall, and living room and dining room to the right of the hall done in six inch parquet wood tile.

We moved in here four years ago, and waited to do the floors, unfortunately. The marble is awful, and in bad shape, and the parquet tiles were not laid down well - there are spaces, and it just isn't attractive, anyway. The carpet is a nightmare - constantly needing shampooing. There is three quarter plywood under it. As a matter of fact, this 60s ranch has plywood everywhere - there are no wood floors.

We had hoped to use engineered wood - the Mirage, but I am being told that while the halls are no problem, we need to add half inch plywood to LR and DR, becausew they will not warranty the material over wood - the floor will move. This would bring the level of those rooms higher than the hall, requiring some sort of transition saddle. The engineered wood we are looking at is already a half inch thick. Even if we go with the thinner engineered wood, we still need the plywood. Mirage does make a floating floor, but I was told that the wear layer is extremely thin, and you can not repair or refinish it even once.

We had considered laminate, but did not like any of what we saw. It would have been great if we liked it, because installation is no problem, and maintenance is a breeze. It just does not look like wood. This is a vast expanse of flooring- from the front entrance, you are looking at the entire hallway, and living room and dining room, and we wanted to have a flow of one kind of flooring. Right now it looks chopped up, with a different floor everywhere you look.

We thought of trying to match the parquet in the halls, and just leave it in the LR and DR, but it will never match, and we're not happy with it anyway. We could rip up the hallway marble and carpet and just install new marble, but 1) marble is slippery), and 2) we still would not have the expanse of one flooring throughout.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how we can unify all the flooring here without having to raise floor levels?