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.