Floor types: what's in a name?

What's in a name: laminate, melamine, engineered, veneer, solid

The most confusion is about laminated flooring, used by DIY-ers (and even some suppliers) for both Melamine Laminated Flooring (the ‘plastic’ – Melamine’ stuff with only a photo-copy of wood) and for Wood-Engineered and Wood-Veneered flooring (flooring with a solid wood top layer between 0.2mm and 6 – 8mm with a crossed-backing of pine/plywood or mdf).

In the (English) wood-flooring profession laminate is used to describe the Melamine flooring (like Pergo, Quick-step etc).

The term Wood-Veneer is used when the solid wooden top layer has a thickness between 0.2 to 2mm

Wood-Engineered covers the rest of the ‘engineered’ flooring where the solid wooden top layer is more than 2mm thick (and can go up to even 8mm), but has a crossed-backing of a different material than the top layer.

Real wood is sometimes used to describe Wood-Engineered and Wood-Veneer flooring as opposed to the Melamine Laminated flooring.

Another rule of thumb with Wood-Engineered is that the backing material is minimum twice the thickness of the solid top layer (i.e. 15mm total thickness of the board means that the top layer should not be thicker than 5mm). Thicker than that will cause too much tension on the board because the solid wood is much stronger than any backing. 8mm solid top layer on a 14mm plywood backing is wrong and can cause the board to buckle/cup and even split the whole board.

Miss-use of Parquet term. Where in the mainland of Europe Parquet (Parket) means wooden flooring (any wooden flooring, from solid, wood-engineered to wood block design patterns like herringbone) in the UK the term Parquet is commonly used to describe the latter: wood blocks in any design pattern.

We have noticed however that some manufacturers and retailers use the term Parquet in the UK to promote the 3-strip Wood-Engineered (or 3-strip Wood-Veneer) flooring, which does lead to disappointed customers expecting a real (solid) ‘old-fashioned’ parquet floor instead of the T&G (or click) boards they are in fact purchasing.