It never ceases to amaze me when I hear someone say, “I don’t want engineered flooring, I want real hardwood flooring.” Obviously, there are still a number of misconceptions out there about what engineered hardwood flooring is all about. And that’s easy to understand when you consider the evolution of engineered hardwood over the past 20 years or so.
Before it was called engineered hardwood flooring, we had “laminated” flooring. The product was made by laminating an odd number of rotary-peeled hardwood veneers (mostly oak or maple), cross-plied, to create a dimensionally stable flooring product. Each veneer layer was made from the same species of wood. That was important for the product to work, as it had to be balanced for consistent expansion and contraction of the wood.