3/4″ Naildown on Concrete – Follow Up

I heard back from Gordon after his question about nailing down a 3/4″ solid floor to concrete – so here’s our follow up work with him.
Q: The only problem with the solution you provide is the additional height the 2x4s would impose. Even laid sideways, I still loose 1.5″ in my room height and would have major adjustments to my doors.
Hmmm it seems the best solution is to not try the nail down stuff over concrete…
I was looking at the nail down stuff because it brought so much more selection. Maybe I just need to go with engineered.
What are your thought on the durability of the engineered vs. the solid? In engineered the is 5″ widths (my wife loves) but the solids in 1/2″ and 3/8″ (glue down) only go to 3″
Gordon
A: I’m a big fan of engineered floors to be honest. Don’t get me wrong, a traditional 3/4″ solid really adds a certain appeal to any home, but engineered floors are designed for success in cases like yours. Here’s the break down – the cross-ply lamination technique used to make engineered flooring vastly improves the floors dent resistance as well as prevents expansion and contraction. The cross-plies act as a form of checks and balances so to speak.
The reason why it is more common to find the wider planks in engineered versus solid is pretty basic. The wider a plank of wood gets, the less of that size you can get from a tree and thus price tends to go up. With a solid, the standard size for most domestic species (such as Oak, Maple, Hickory etc) is less than 3″ (also called Strip flooring). However, with an engineered product, you need far less wood to make the top layer (referred to as species layer), so what normally would only make 1 plank of solid wood can now make 3 or more planks of engineered flooring – so wider planks become more common. The other reason behind the wide planks being common is that these are more dimensionally stable, which is key for engineered floors as they are usually meant to handle floating installations on top of nail or glue down applications. Strip flooring is not stable enough to pull off a floating installation.
There are several excellent manufacturers of engineered flooring: Award, BR-111, Bellefloor, Bruce, Kahrs, Saso, and Westhollow all have some great lines. With your particular installation, I would look into a floor you can float as this is much easier to install than a glue down application. If you get a high quality engineered floor and combine it with 3mm cork as a underlayment (as this will save on height vs 6mm) you’ll get a great looking floor that will feel much like a 3/4″ solid.