ᐅ Disadvantages of engineered wood veneer flooring? Apart from the inability to sand and refinish?

Hello everyone,

We have a newly built house and have been looking into flooring options lately. For the living room on the ground floor, we will use standard multilayer parquet. For the other four rooms, we initially considered vinyl flooring due to the high cost of parquet. Then some people recommended a "veneer floor" as well. This is basically parquet with a very thin wear layer.

Advantages: affordable, parquet appearance, warm underfoot... basically all the benefits of parquet.
Disadvantages: it cannot be sanded down.

Several people have told us that the inability to sand it is not really a disadvantage anymore, since hardly anyone sands their floors nowadays. Tastes also change, so with veneer flooring you have the “advantage” that after about 15 years—if the wear bothers you—you can replace it with something completely different. You don’t have to pay a lot upfront for parquet. In terms of price, veneer flooring from the company Kährs costs around €30/m² (about $30/sq ft), while real parquet nowadays is at least €60/m² (about $60/sq ft).

Do you have any experience with this type of flooring? We are not looking for a floor we have to live with for a lifetime. If the wear looks bad in 15 years, we can choose something else. That’s fine with us.

Thanks in advance for your experiences.

You can get parquet flooring starting at €30 per square meter (approximately $28 per square foot). Why would you choose such a poor option?

SoL schrieb:

You can get parquet flooring starting at €30 per square meter (about $2.80 per square foot).
Why would you want to go for such a poor option?

I already explained above why. This is basically parquet flooring but cheaper. We have visited several stores here for weeks, the cheapest were €50–60 per square meter (about $4.65–5.60 per square foot). The good ones are €80–90–100 per square meter (about $7.40–8.35–9.30 per square foot). Oak plank flooring.

Could it be that your price info is not completely up to date?

We have parquet flooring in the living room and veneer flooring in the other rooms. It has been installed for about 1.5 years. So far, we have no negative feedback. Most guests don’t even notice the difference. The veneer floor is just smoother with less texture.
Overall, the flooring is quite hard and has so far survived two toddlers, including various stains and accidents (sorry ;-).
There are scratches, but you will find those on vinyl floors as well.
An important reason for choosing this flooring was its very good thermal transmittance coefficient. We installed it as a floating floor and still manage with very low heating demand. (Old building, 36°C (97°F) at an outdoor temperature of -10°C (14°F)) Standard three-layer parquet performs much worse in this regard.
And if a floor is really damaged in one room, thanks to the floating installation, it can be replaced within a day.

Edit: All natural, regular oak with medium "knotting." I don’t remember the exact fancy product name.

christophen schrieb:

Could it be that your information about the prices is not entirely up to date?

Google shows something different...
Links are not really welcome here, but when I search for hardwood flooring, the selection is overwhelming. And €30 per m² (about $28 per sq ft) is also among the prices.

christophen schrieb:

I already explained above why. This is a parquet floor but cheaper. We visited several stores here over the past weeks; the cheapest were €50-60. The good ones are €80-90-100. Oak wide plank flooring.

Oak parquet from about €22 (approximately $24). Then engineered two-layer parquet (fully sufficient for underfloor heating). Your €80-100 (approximately $87-$109) will soon be solid wood tongue-and-groove planks.

I paid just over €30 (about $33) for my Haro smoked oak engineered wide planks, oiled briefly. High-quality branded parquet.