Prefinished hardwood flooring has a multitude of price levels and sometimes an overwhelming amount of color options. When you choose a prefinished product, you know what it is going to look like before it has been installed in your home. There isn’t the guessing game of getting the wood installed and then trying to find a color that matches your color scheme. With prefinished, you take home the samples, view them in your space and compare them to your other design changes and paint colors. This virtually removes the nerve-racking indecisions of color selection during a project and places those decisions at the beginning of the project before your home is in disarray and you just want to get back to living.
Having decided on a prefinished hardwood flooring. You then need to decide a price range for your budget. Prefinished flooring, unlike unfinished, solid hardwood flooring, can range greatly in quality and the value it may or may not add to your home. Hardwood flooring has universally been known to add value to a home. This has become less true with the advent of most engineered hardwood flooring. There are some truly cheap and poorly constructed engineered floors. In order to add the same value that you would with an unfinished solid product, you need to make sure that the engineered product you are putting in your home will last generations, just like it’s solid counterpart. To do this, the floor needs to have at least a 4mm wear layer (real hardwood surface). This floor will also need to be constructed from superior products, and be acclimated, especially in Colorado, to avoid the problems that can arise from being in an extremely dry climate.
Less expensive prefinished flooring, solid and engineered, comes with a price tag. In the industry, there are budget floors, products that are intended solely for a quick aesthetic upgrade. These floors are constructed of inferior materials by inferior mills. Their sole purpose is to put a bandaid on a project, just enough to make it look good, long enough to get it rented or, more often, sold. This isn’t to say that these floors should be thrown away and never used. These floors serve a purpose; they can be an inexpensive way to finish up a space, they are great when used in fixer-uppers, they are also readily available at most any purveyor. This flooring should, however, never be used as a permanent flooring solution that will add value to a home.
