Engineered Solid Hardwood Flooring

The name sounds like a contradiction, and it is worth explaining because it is the single most useful thing to understand about buying wood floors today. “Solid” here refers to the wear layer, not the plank. These are engineered floors — layered, cross-built, dimensionally stable — but the top layer is a thick piece of sawn hardwood rather than a thin sliced one.

Sawn veneer is cut with a saw, the same way lumber is milled. Sliced veneer is shaved off a log like a roll of paper. The sawn face is thicker, more stable, and takes a finish the way solid wood does. In this category the wear layers run from 3.2mm up to 3/8 inch — thick enough to be sanded and refinished, in some cases more than once. By comparison, much of our standard engineered range uses 1.5mm to 3mm veneer, which can be refinished lightly or not at all.

That is the whole point of the category. You get the dimensional stability that lets a floor go over concrete, over radiant heat, or into a wider plank without cupping — while keeping the option to restore the surface rather than tear it out. Most of this range also carries a 50-year residential warranty.

It is the choice we point people toward when they want wide planks. A seven- or nine-inch solid board is asking a lot of Michigan’s humidity swings; the same width in engineered solid behaves itself.

We stock 188 products in this category from Lauzon, Somerset and Viking. Pricing runs from around $8.75 per square foot to about $12, averaging near $9.80 — it is the most consistently priced category we carry, because there is very little cheap product in it. Some brands are call-for-pricing.

Worth seeing in person: wear-layer thickness is the number that decides whether a floor can be refinished later, and it is not something a photograph conveys. Free samples at our Livonia showroom.