I don't think hardwood is significantly more expensive than the better engineered woods- at least that is my recollection from when we shopped for them both. It seemed to me that with hardwoods you were paying for the labor and with engineered you were paying for the product, so the labor was baked into the price of the planks.

We went with hardwoods. Engineered would have been simpler and quicker. I really didn't like the idea of not being able to refinish the floors indefinitely.

As I understand it, if you're on a slab you need engineered wood, which is more dimensionally stable. The "wear" layer on the better engineered woods allows a few sandings and refinishings.

I went through this about a year ago. As a woodworker, I was certain that I wanted solid hardwood; however as I looked more into it I went with engineered with a thick wear layer (I think 4mm to 6mm).

Engineered is a bit less expensive, much more stable (no expansion/contraction/warping with humidity), and typically you can’t refinish hardwood past the tongue and groove anyway (so not significantly more refinishing than a thick wear-layer engineered). I think about 8mm would be equivalent of what you could refinish with true T&G hardwood.

Further, the engineered are much straighter than anything I’ve seen in solid hardwood so the installers did not need to warp them back in shape.

It's so nice to have a woodworker's perspective on this. Thank you, marcaevans. It would have been so much simpler to have gone with the engineered. Next time there will be no contest for me in light of your comment (there were some beautiful engineered woods.) My husband will probably lobby for the regular hardwood though.

"warp them back in shape." What? I have installed hardwood myself in my house and did not need to "warp" the wood. It was straight then and still is ~ten years later. It was not hard to install - labor intensive maybe but all flooring is.