Flooring – Should I change all floors or only one

floorflooring

I have two different type of flooring on my second floor. I have almost 30 sqm with dry pine flooring (four rooms), and 8 sqm with vinyl (one room). The pine planks are not nailed to the floor, I can lift the planks with my fingers.

I have two alternatives, as far as I can see.

  1. Change the vinyl to pine flooring.
  2. Change all floors to engineered hardwood flooring

I have been "the helping hand" when laying EHF once, but other than that I have no experience.

My question is:

What would require the least effort / be simplest? I would need to sand and oil the existing pine floor if I decide to keep it. I guess it would take quite some time on 30 sqm floor to make it look nice.

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Best Answer

If it were me I would give serious thought to replacing both with engineered hardwood flooring. If your pine were in perfect shape and properly installed it would be worth trying to save and match it. But if it's not nailed down as you mentioned you can't hope to sand it out with any consistency and if it's very old you might have trouble matching the color/grain pattern etc. (softwoods tend to enrich their color over time in a way that's very hard to reproduce and old grown pine looks very different from farmed pines).

The one warning I will give you (and this is the case with any flooring) is that your floor will only be as good as the prep to the substructure. I can't stress this enough. Take whatever steps are necessary to get your base as perfectly solid, stable, flat and level as possible, especially if the grade changes as it appears to do where it transitions from wood to vinyl. Installing EHF is easy if your substructure is good but impossible if it's bad. Best of luck!