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$8 to $12 per square foot
Difficulty: Moderate
The flooring pieces are lightweight and easy to cut and install, but working on your knees all day is no picnic.
Jeff Hosking, a flooring consultant for This Old House, first began laying floors 35 years ago. Back then, 90 percent of his work was installing solid-wood strips with nails. But now, half of the flooring he installs is engineered—made of thin sheets of wood glued together like plywood.
Solid wood is classic and can last a century, but engineered flooring offers a quicker, easier way to get a new floor, and it comes with a durable factory-applied finish.
Because it's laminated, it's more stable than solid wood, so you can put it over concrete or radiant floors, and not worry about warping. And Hosking says the finishes are far more durable than anything he can apply on-site.
Top-of-the-line engineered strips range from about $8 to $12 per square foot. That's higher than solid-wood planks, but homeowners can offset the expense by tackling the installation themselves.
