Fair enough. :P
I don’t know about hardwood or engineered but I will say that pergo floors are rediculously easy to install yourself. Based on comments upthread, it sounds like engineered floors are similar.
Laminate + dogs = disaster
Can you elaborate? Scratches, or lack of traction, or both?
Hah we have that situation, not sure what brand of flooring but I bought the house with it already a few years old. I was worried about it at first but hardly look at it anymore so I couldn’t even tell you if it’s all scratched up. They do click around like crazy when they walk over it though.
The previous owners installed it just prior to putting their home on the market and it looked great. Fast forward a couple of years and it is horribly scratched. It looks pretty awful.
There’s also the sliding and the clicking, but those are secondary concerns.
I was just doing some browsing online and most people say that newer high quality laminates hold up okay to scratching (though no one ever mentions long-term wear) but can still suffer from water damage due to pets relieving themselves. I see there is supposed to be a seal to keep liquids from getting underneath the floor but it doesn’t always work.
I had a minor below-the-floor toilet leak and it bubbled up the fake wood in my second bathroom pretty badly if you look at it from the right angle (will eventually get around to replacing it). Never had any problems with that aspect of pets. Our newest puppy always just went in the bedroom that no one uses, which is why we’ll be replacing the carpet now. :)
It’s solid wood. They tried to push an engineered version on me at the last second but i vacillated from annoyance and they rescinded the offer. I had it installed. It took them about 2 1/2 days with a crew between 3-5 at different times of the day. Because this is a slab they lay a sealer first and then glued it down. If i had used an engineered wood, as i understand it, they would have floated the wood instead.
Pergo/Laminate sucks because it’s paper with a plastic coat. There are also differences in quality between laminates (obviously) so an already cheap product can get even lower quality. Some laminates are virtually indistinguishable from vinyl (they come in flexible thin sheets), and in fact there are now vinyls that look like laminates, making it really confusing on the low end.
There is also a pretty substantial difference between kinds of engineered woods. An expensive few had a veneer that was very thick - most had a thin veneer, and on some the veneer was thin it was almost unmeasurable to the unaided eye. But, then, so are the hardwood options. Most of these differences are downplayed or not even mentioned at the home floor stores i visited. And it was useless asking for advice from Home Despot or Lowe’s as there were no floor specialists worth speaking of around here (they didn’t even know the difference between laminate and wood).