The Ultimate Guide to Wood-Look Flooring

Y’all know how it is! The hunt for the perfect diet or weight loss strategy, or how to fertilize a tomato plant, or best way to change a diaper, or really anything typically ends in a stressful google experience because there’s just so much differing opinion on EVERYTHING these days! So we wanted to make it super easy for you when you’re trying to determine the perfect flooring for YOU! We’ll be looking at 4 options: 1. Natural Hardwood.  2. Luxury Vinyl Plank. 3. Engineered Hardwood. 4. Wood Look Tile. By the time you get to the end, our hope is that you’ll be armed with the knowledge and tools to be able to decide which flooring is right for you!! If you have any questions, totally let us know in the comments and we can continue to help you pick the right thing for you!!

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first - do a LIFESTYLE + PERSONALITY CHECK

Okay, first things first, and for the love, please do not skip this step! This step is arguably the most important thing to look at when picking your floors, that’s why I’ve put it at the top!!! The most important thing to do before you go buy flooring, don’t think about the cost yet, don’t think about the pros and cons of the material, don’t think of anything except A. How do you live your life? And B. How much do I care? 

A. How do you live your life?

Now be honest here! Because the answers here don’t necessarily remove any of the options for you! (That’s more the next question) But being honest here will help you narrow down your options! 

So what does your day to day life look like? I’m talking, do we have pets in the home? Sweet furry friends who love to jump and play, or a lazy-lou who lays in his lonely corner and only raises his head when he hears the potato chip bag crinkle? Do we have children at the house who accidentally tromp in mud and may or may not spill their drink at every other meal? Have you ever had a washer/dishwasher leak? Is that something you could see happening again in the future? Are you a lively cook like me (read: Messy) or are you Ina Garten 2.0 (my hero) keeping your floors tidy and lovely?! 

Begin to take an assessment of how you live your life, and don’t plan to change the rules all of a sudden. If your kids run in and out with muddy feet, that’s okay! Don’t be tempted to say “well, that’ll change when we get new floors.” The purpose of your home is to encourage life in your family! If that means running in and out with muddy feet, then let’s go with it!! 

B. Do I Care?

The honest answers to this question are going to really help lead us to the right flooring for us. 

Are you the type of person who buys the designer purse or the knock off in NYC? Do you care? Some people are stuck-like-glue to the real deal while others couldn’t care a fig! What about potential damage? When your floor is newly installed. Let’s say it’s been in for 2 weeks and is PERFECT. Is it going to absolutely crush your soul to see the first scratch? What about worn spots and faded areas over time? Think about how much do you really care, and this will help you know how to decide! 

second - but what about price?

Easy. Read this carefully!!!! - EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. OF. THESE. OPTIONS. COSTS. THE. SAME. PRICE. Boom.

Oftentimes we see people going for one product over another based on the cost and it makes me so sad! Because people just assume that one is really high, while others are really cheap! Now let me be clear, if you run out to a big box store and buy a product whose name is similar to something I’ve mentioned here and it’s $1.25 a square foot, I want to let you know friend, the product your buying will most certainly NOT maintain the same characteristics as what i’m describing below. (We are big believers in “you get what you pay for” and we wish everyone could learn that lesson through us here! Don’t learn it the hard way the way we have!)

So keep that in mind friend! To reap the benefits of each of these options, we’ll be looking at a high quality version of each product and that’s going to put us at at about $10-$15 per square foot.

Now that you know your basics you can freely choose which flooring is best for you! Keep reading for allllllll of the technical details!

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THE OPTIONS

1. NATURAL HARDWOOD

When we visited France in November 2019, at one point while we were wandering the halls of the palace of versailles, I got so dang tired of walking that I bought myself a ham sandwich and sat right down on the floor. The floor I happened to plop right down on was some of the most beautiful, oldest, most definitely damaged hardwood I’ve ever seen. In that moment, as I’m sitting on hundreds and hundreds of years of age, wear, water damage, and countless visitors shoes tromping across, I thought to myself “oh that’s it. I get it. Hardwood has the same timeless quality as marble. Even in the damage, even in the wear, it somehow retains it’s beauty like only marble can do.”

I die. We all die!! For gorgeous natural hardwood floors. Y’all, the earthy, organic, warmth they bring to a space is unreal; utterly timeless in all ways! I love it, you love it! Now let’s get down to the true pros and cons, because I don’t even have to lay down a foundation to defend it’s beauty; you already know it’s gorgeous! So I’ll just go into functional pros and cons! 

Pros: 

• Hardwood floors can be patched in

  • In the event that you have a leak, or some minor damage to an area or a plank, the area can easily be removed and new boards can be laced in. This is great news for your wood! (Although keep in mind, to create a perfectly blended stain match, you’d then have to sand all of your floors, and re-stain.)

• Hardwood can be stained and re-stained

  • This can happen up to 10 times throughout the life of the floor. This can be the most encouraging and hopeful news for people thinking of getting hardwoods! Even with potential damage to your floors, just get them sanded and re-stained! No big deal! Or have you grown tired of the color, that’s okay! Just redo them! 

• Hardwood is naturally antibacterial and antimicrobial

  •  It naturally eliminates 99% of potential contaminants. This is great news for people who suffer from allergies, or anyone who does, or may soon have little ones crawling on the floor. Even without a sweep or a mop, the natural quality of hardwood lends itself to be a healthful option.

• Hardwood is naturally warm and medium hard

  • Remaining between 70-80 degrees, hardwood floors feel good on bare feet, and aren’t terrible on joints because it’s just between hard and soft. It’s not padded like carpet of course, but still has a natural give that makes it easy on the body. 

Cons: 

• Water damage can ruin floors

  • A leaky pipe, the dishwasher breaking, a toilet overflowing, a swimming dog coming in to lay down, any of these things can cause pretty severe damage to wood floors. Causing plank separation, swelling, puffing, or popping nails. Water is the enemy to natural hardwood floors. 

• Scratching + General wear

  • Your wood floor will get scratched. Period. Both big gashes resulting from dragging a dresser across the room, and small nicks and scratches from dropping a spoon or walking in heels. Also, high-traffic areas will begin to wear down revealing the natural wood tone over time. They can also wear the wood down to create a divet or depression in the wood in high-traffic areas. (Check back in on step one: your personality check! Is this okay with you? Great!! Do it! Does this give you anxiety, then keep reading!)

2. LUXURY VINYL PLANK

So, full disclosure friends, I have this product installed throughout my entire house! That should speak volumes in and of itself because I truly believe in the benefits of LVP! We intentionally have placed the LVP flooring in second place in our list because it’s truly amazing. We are big proponents of the product, but ONLY when you get the good stuff! This product is very attractive, many times indistinguishable from hardwood, although with a close look you can see it’s not natural hardwood. This product unfortunately can get a bad rap because of outdated items that have been sold under similar names. Shiny, and unrealistic looking with bad patterns and hideous functionality, that is NOT what we’re talking about here! Check out the pros and cons below to get a better idea of what this product can offer! 

Pros:

• Scratch proof

  • You can take a penny and just scrape it all over this flooring with absolutely zero damage. Incredibly durable. That being said, come on, be realistic, if you are sliding your fridge into it’s spot and the corner gets hung up on this floor, it will create a scar on the floor, but read the next point and you’ll be like “oh! okay that’s not so bad!”

• Color-through

  • The entire plank of flooring is the same color as you see on the top. This is amazing because in the event that your floor does get scarred or scratched from a severe furniture drag, you can hardly see it! Because the material is the same color from top to bottom.

• Water proof

  • You read it. And there are zero caveats. The product is a PVC/plastic polymer that physically cannot absorb water. This product cannot be damaged by liquid sitting on it. Even if it sits on it for hours.

• Fade proof

  • Even when located in the harshest sunlight, this product will not fade.

• Life proof

  • Dogs. Kids. Mud. Spaghetti Spills. Bright sun coming through a window. You name it. This product won’t stain, puff, fade, scratch, anything! It’s a miracle!

• Warm and soft

  • Remaining between 70-80 degrees this flooring feels good on bare feet, but the best part is, the high quality LVP comes with a significant padding layer below it, making it cushy and easy on joints.

• Easy DIY install

  • Click + install. Easy peasy lemon squeezy if you’re feeling independent!

CONS:

• “Are those REAL hardwoods?!”

  • It will happen to you. And you’ll have to go through the whole spiel about “It’s called Luxury Vinyl Plank and we selected it because of the following benefits….” — If you’re the type of person who values the “YES! OF COURSE IT’S A REAL HERMES” then girl you better just scroll up to natural hardwood and land there!

• Difficult to patch

  • Although the install is a cinch, say you unfortunately get a slab leak in a few years, and you just need to access this one spot under your floor. In order to properly access that spot, you’d need to remove all of the floor until you reach the exact spot. This may be okay depending on your home’s layout, but it may be a true pain in the rear! (but realistically, isn’t a slab leak ALWAYS a pain in the rear)

• Products discontinued

  • As with any purchased product, they will discontinue certain colors, lines, etc, then you may be in a bind in future. Buy extra!

3. ENGINEERED HARDWOOD

To be fair to all of you, this product is really difficult for me to wrap my head around if I’m being honest. Especially knowing what I said at the very beginning about how all of this is the same cost?! That being said, I will give a little bit of grace to this option only because if you really want to install your floor yourself, and you love being a DIY queen, but you also want the look of natural hardwood, then okay, fine, this product may be for you! Peace and blessings if you choose to DIY engineered hardwood. But for anyone out there who is NOT going to DIY this project, and is waffling between engineered or natural hardwood, girl quit it right now!!! Quit it! And read that lengthy list of cons below.

Pros:

• DIY

  • Click + install. Easy peasy lemon squeezy if you’re feeling independent!

Cons:

• Water + Scratch + wear 

  • Hello, all the cons of the real wood floor, except actually WORSE. Because unlike the floors at Versailles that retained their beauty even through the damage, these floors, since the natural wood that you see as your flooring is affixed to a different type of wood below it, the water damage creates puffing and can bow your flooring up and create buckling! YIKES.

• Can only be refinished one time, if that

  • Where hardwood is near limitless, engineered hardwood can be refinished only one time. And often times not even that one time because they’re often made so thin, or with scraping patterns that make this impossible.

• Difficult to patch

  • Much like the LVP, this click + install flooring technically requires you to dismantle much of your floor to get to any underlying issues below.

• Products discontinued 

  • As with any purchased product, they will discontinue certain colors, lines, etc, then you may be in a bind in future. Buy extra!

• Sun fading

  • This is a pretty severe problem we’ve seen with this product. The sun does serious damage on the finishes of these engineered products.

• Warm but hard

  • While this product is warm, which is great, the process of manufacturing the planks creates a rigidity and hardness not found in natural hardwood. (While, i’ll be fair, it’s not as bad as option 4, just below, no spoilers, it is certainly not as good as option 1 or 2.)

4. WOOD-LOOK TILE

Quit it. Quit it right now. For my own sanity just quit ittttttt!

Okay. Now that I’ve thoroughly pouted, I’ll be more positive and honest about this product, cuz truth be told, wood-look tile DOES have it’s place in the home, and that place should be limited to high wet zones that need to be sealed. I’m taking exclusively bathrooms and possibly laundry rooms. In fairness, I truly do love a wood-look tile in a bathroom! It’s a great option there! But if you are trying to tell me right now that you want to put wood-look tile throughout your whole house, I’m going to just have to mute you right now! Don’t do ittttt! Please don’t do it!! There’s no reason for it!! There’s such better options (hellooooo options 1 and 2!)

Pros: 

• Water proof

  • This is easily the top pro here. Since ceramic tiles are grouted and sealed, you really do have a 100% water tight situation. That’s so great and necessary for places like bathrooms! (Think wood shower walls! Very cool!)

• Scratch resistant

  • This product is not scratch proof but is a sturdy material that can withstand much wear.

Cons: 

• Not color through

  • If this flooring get’s scratched or damaged, you will see it very clearly and it will need to be replaced pronto because a broken tile can be a safety concern.

• Products discontinued 

  • As with any purchased product, they will discontinue certain colors, lines, etc, then you may be in a bind in future! Buy extra!

• Cold and hard

  • This flooring is really not recommended for homes with disabilities or elderly. It is dangerously hard, has zero give, and the cold temperature is hard on people who suffer from arthritis and joint paint.

IN OUR OPINIOn

There are so many great wood-look options for anybody out there! Just remember to be honest about your lifestyle and your personality then dive in head first! Our two favorite go-to’s are always natural hardwood and a great quality Luxury Vinyl Plank, depending on lifestyle. Between those two, you can pretty much get anywhere you’re trying to go!

ABOUT US

We’re Sarah and Katie — sisters who own and operate a full-scale interior design and home-remodeling firm in North Texas! Check out our portfolio or these Before & Afters for some inspiration!!

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