Upgrading to Engineered Hardwood Floors

My husband and I bought our first house almost exactly two years ago. It was a builder home with worn-out, cookie-cutter finishes from the ‘90s…but it had the layout, price, and neighborhood that we wanted. We knew we could upgrade those dated finishes over time, adding value to the house and making it more our style. And in the past two years, that’s exactly what we’ve done! We’ve renovated bathrooms, updated every light fixture, painted every wall, and made lots of cosmetic changes that we’re proud of. But none of those upgrades compare to this one! We just installed new engineered hardwood flooring throughout the main level of our house, and it is such a huge improvement! Because it flows from room to room, it really feels like the entire house got a major makeover.

Flooring is a big project. It’s not like painting a wall, where changing the color a few years later is no big deal. Flooring is expensive and takes a ton of effort to replace (before you can even start, you have to move every piece of furniture, including appliances!). So we wanted to get it right the first time. We started out by looking at inspiration photos. My husband and I don’t always agree on design decisions, but this time we easily did: light and natural looking wood, with warm undertones (not too dark, not too gray, not too whitewashed).

With that in mind, we headed to our local Home Depot to start our search. We quickly realized there was a lot more to the decision than just choosing the perfect color. First of all, did we want solid hardwood floors? Engineered hardwood? Bamboo? Luxury vinyl planks? Laminate? Wood look tile? And beyond material, there was more. Standard planks? Wide planks? Smooth planks? Or texture? There were rows and rows of different options, and many of them fit our criteria of “budget-friendly” and “looks like light wood.” Clearly, we needed to narrow things down.

Here’s a tip: most of the samples I grabbed were free from the store! Did you know that every one of those display panels pulls back to reveal take-home samples of that flooring?

Once we decided on the type of flooring, we still had a few decisions to go. First of all, we had to decide whether to hire out the installation or do it ourselves. The click lock engineered hardwood is known for being fairly DIY-friendly. But we have two toddlers and were worried that the project would take more than a weekend to complete, so we decided to leave it to the pros. A big plus of this? By using The Home Depot’s installation services, we could get our floors warrantied, which gives us great peace of mind.

If you’ve never had flooring installed through The Home Depot before, here’s what to expect. First, you’ll schedule an in-home measure. There are usually plenty of time slots to choose from so you can find one that works with your schedule. Someone will come to your house to measure the floor plan and get the accurate square footage (take this number and order at least 10% extra to account for cuts). They’ll also check for dips and moisture in your floor. Based on their readings, you’ll get a call with a quote for the installation project.

The quote includes every little thing you might possibly want as part of the service; they’ll even disassemble beds and move furniture for you. But if you’d rather save money (always a priority for us!) you can take any of those extra services out. We chose to have the professionals JUST install the floors, which shaved quite a lot off our estimate. It also meant it was still a lot of work on our end to get ready! We removed all the furniture and appliances ourselves, took up the old flooring, removed the baseboards, and brought in the boxes of new flooring.

We could have stopped there, but I was really eager to see the planks so I unboxed the majority of them. It was at this point that I really started to get excited. It’s one thing to see a little sample, but it feels so much more real when you see the full size boards! I could already tell, these floors were going to be beautiful.