What's in a name: laminated, melamine, engineered, composed, parquet etc
As a member of two Online DIY forums we frequently give free advice to any "would be" wooden flooring installer. We do notice there is a lot of confusion about names of products and before we continue with other wooden flooring items we would like to introduce a more righteous terminology in types of floor covering.
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 officially only used when the solid wooden top layer has a thickness between 0.2 to 1.5mm but frequently Internet searchers mean all the different types of Wood-Engineered flooring when using this term.
The top layer of this kind of product isn’t sawn, but peeled from the trunk and then glued (under high pressure) to a backing of mostly HDF. Although a very thin layer it is (normally) not of inferior quality. A veneer board can't be sanded though.
Wood-Engineered covers the rest of the ‘engineered’ flooring where the solid wooden top layer is more than 1.5mm thick (and can go up to even 8mm), but has a crossed-backing of a different material than the top layer.
Solid wooden flooring with cross backing of the same wood (to make it more stable) is called ‘composed’ wooden flooring.
Real wood is sometimes used to describe Wood-Engineered and Wood-Veneer flooring as opposed to the Melamine Laminated flooring.
Solid wood T&G boards: these are made out of the same material (Oak, Maple etc) with Tongue and Groove on all four sides (although some manufacturers/saw-mills still create them only on the two long sides).
Parquet or overlay: unfinished Solid planks/strips/tiles/blocks without T&G, which are either glued and nailed on a solid mosaic (5-7 ‘fingers’-tiles) or plywood/chipboard subfloor or glued directly on a concrete/screed underfloor (like mosaic tiles, herringbone or other patterns). The planks/strips/tiles/blocks are 6 to 10mm thick and are known in The Netherlands and Belgium as Overlay floors.
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.
