Hardwood, Engineered, or Laminate Floor on a Budget

Chances are you're familiar with this question: Hardwood or Laminate Flooring?

For the front part of the lounge in Lancaster, we have about 750SF of the cafe/coffee shop area. Ideally, we would lay natural, high-quality hardwood down, but everyone knows the price of doing so can be high. In the last property we renovated two years ago, we used the cheap laminate flooring that comes in at around $1 a SF and is about 1/4" thick. Under heavy use, it's opened up in a few areas in the butting areas, and has also chipped where furniture has been dragged across the edges. For these reasons, we should go with a higher quality material for this location, but as always, cost is an issue.

I recently read Green on Montrose's post about their choice of American Black Cherry because of it's a high quality material, locally produced, and comes from a company that is conscious of the environment, . It looks beautiful installed, but they were able to spend a bit more than we have in our budget. So what are we going to do?

There are higher quality laminate floor options, the engineered hardwood which is a blend of the best of both worlds. It has layers of engineered wood to increase flexibility and decrease shrinkage and expansion, it has up to 3/8" thick wood on top that will look and feel like natural hardwoods, and will also have the option to be refinished once.

I'm still looking into these and finding the best options. I'll try and post some photos of the available options and of the space we're covering...

--Friday 5/22/09 Update--

I've been in contact with local flooring store in Lancaster. The manager is very knowledgeable and told me they have a number of FSC Certified hardwood and engineered hardwoods available for under $3SF. I'll be stopping in tomorrow to look with Ralph, and we'll be making our selection. I'll try to take some photos of all of the options.