LAMINATE

Laminate Floor Basics

Laminate flooring is a high-quality image of wood fused to a fiberboard core and topped with a super-hardy transparent wear layer. Laminate’s resale value tends to be moderate. But laminate is hardly lagging behind: laminate flooring manufacturers have responded to the competition from engineered wood and have stepped up their game. Newer iterations of laminate flooring not only look even more like wood but feel like it, due to deeper embossing of wood grain textures. Thicker premium 12 mm laminates, too, have convinced higher-end buyers to try the product.

Laminate Structure

Laminate flooring was invented in 1977 by the Swedish company Perstorp. This firm hit upon the brilliant idea of using up waste wood projects by subjecting those products to intensely high pressure, heat, and binding chemicals, and turning the result into usable floor coverings. Since that time, many other manufacturers such as Dupont, Mannington, Armstrong, and Shaw have begun making laminate flooring.

Wear Layer

Laminate flooring is a surface layer of two thin sheets of paper impregnated with melamine. This top-most surface layer is a hard transparent type of plastic sheet that is impervious to dogs, chairs, high heels, and other common damaging elements.

Image Layer

Even when viewed close-up laminate flooring can look realistic. This is due to laminate’s photographic- quality image of real wood underneath the wear layer.Laminate flooring’s realistic visuals can’t be distinguished from hardwood You can’t beat the realism of high quality laminate flooring. The decor-layer printing of laminate flooring gets better and better. A big reason for the jaw-dropping realism of laminate flooring products has to do with continued technological improvements in printing

Core

Under the wood grain photograph is about a half inch of wood chip composite. Any type of wood chip composite or particleboard is inherently susceptible to water damage.  Laminate floorings base/core is considered to be dimensionally stable, but only to a certain degree. It will stand up to some water, but only is this water is quickly removed. It is the best of many worlds. Laminate’s top behaves much like vinyl flooring, in that it is perfectly waterproof if tightly seamed.  But similarities end there. While routinely confused with vinyl flooring, laminate is not vinyl flooring even in the slightest because it is made of completely different materials.

It’s also erroneously called laminate wood flooring. Laminate is wood only in two minor respects, in that it is made up of pressed wood and that it only looks like wood because of the photorealism covered in the clear durable wear layer. It can be installed over an existing floor and is highly stain resistant. And in some cases it comes with a lifetime warranty.