Engineered Oak Flooring

"The best engineered flooring I've ever installed" - Geoff (floor fitter) Pembrokeshire. Engineered oak flooring is a ‘constructed’ alternative to solid oak flooring, and simply explained it's basically a constructed sandwich of oak and plywood that's all heat bonded together to create a board that can be produced wider than solid oak, but without the risk of 'cupping'. This sort of construction provides much better stability after installation than solid in some situations. The oak is what you see and walk on (the wear layer or face) and the plywood underneath is the part that enables this type of construction to provide better stability. It looks exactly like a solid oak board when fitted. Each ply within the multiply backing runs at right angles to its adjacent ply, providing maximum dimensional strength to the sandwich, which is all heat bonded together. This means that engineered oak flooring can be installed virtually anywhere within the home because it ‘behaves itself’ much better than solid oak within areas with light moisture, such as basements, kitchens and bathrooms. Another great advantage to engineered oak is the range of installation options that can be used successfully. It can be nailed down, glued down, or installed as a floating floor. Some people consider that engineered oak flooring's greatest weakness is its ‘thin’ top layer, suggesting that it can only be sanded once or twice but in reality, when an oiled floor is installed and requires some ‘touching up’ here and there, it will simply require a light sanding by hand and another coat or two of oil. This means that you’re not stripping any real depth of the wear layer when you refinish, which means that the wear layer will last as long as a solid board. In fact, our 21mm engineered oak has a 6mm wear layer, which provides as much wear as 18mm solid oak. Some will also claim that unlike solid hardwood, deep scratches and dents in engineered wood cannot be sanded out but that’s only true with boards that have a wear layer of less than 2 or 3mm. The minimum wear layer thickness that we supply is 4mm, so its durability is excellent, even in high traffic areas. We believe our engineered oak flooring to be the best value for money available within the UK.