I can only give you my experience. I've lived for over 20yrs on real hardwood floors. And every time I stand on any kind of laminated plank it looks and feels like cheap plastic. There is just no comparison to actual wood flooring. Timber absorbs vibration, feels pleasant underfoot either barefoot or shoed. It looks real, because it is. Timber planks are 20mm thick, laminate ones are 5mm. Laminate flooring looks like a printed piece of plastic because, well it's very similar except for the top 2mm of veneer stuck to it. It may fool us in brochures and magazines but I've never once been fooled by laminate in person. They can give it all the fancy names they want like 'engineered' but at the end of the day it's all the same stuff. Laminated veneers on cheap plywood. But not one person on the planet has ever fooled that it's a real floorboard. Does timber scratch? Absolutely. So don't put a piano finish on it then. Stick with satin and matte finishes. It shows up the marks a lot less. Does timber dent? Absolutely. But those dents become part of the character of the home over time. I recently lived in a home with floorboards over 100yrs old. They had dents everywhere and yet those boards just looked lived on, they didn't look terrible. Does timber suffer water damage? Yes of course. But before you worry about it, go and check out the thousands of 100yrs old hardwood homes sitting on flood plains in this country. Every single one of them has been underwater more than once in it's lifetime. The original boards are there, strong and unfazed. Unless you plan to flood your home for weeks on end the occassional spill and overflow won't damage the timber at all. I'm a quality over quantity type of person so of course I'm going to rate going with the lifetime option over the rip it out every 5yrs option. If I had the money for hardwood I would not even consider plastic planks.

Hello Stella In the flooring industry this type of flooring was called a floating floor, because it sits on an underlay. Now it is called an engineered floor (and stops the first question being about the noise underfoot).... but the noise remains depending on the level of the floor and the type of underlay. Engineered floors have a number of layers of timber/ply at right angles to allow the expansion/contraction of the grain to be controlled. The top layer is the prefinished or raw timber species that you want with the other layers in various ply. There are cheaper alternatives again that have particle board (chipboard) or mdf backing with a laminate printed pattern. These are, in my humble opinion not worth opening the box. A solid timber floor can be laid a multitude of ways. Over concrete, I waterproof the slab, level it and glue and nail a plywood sheet. The timber is then laid over it, sanded and flooded (gaps filled) then sealed with a finish being either oil or water/oil based polyurethane. It can also be stained before sealing. With the engineered floors, they come from all over the world. Some are made in China, some are made in Indonesia, some are made in Europe and so on. A major supplier to a lot of the flooring companies is a company called Premium Floors. They supply products to eg carpet shops inc Quick-step and have done for many many years. Their website is worth a look before you go out into retail outlets. As to your original question, when I built my first family home I installed a readyflor (premium floors as it happened) floating floor. The floor withstood some almighty parties (before kids) and still looks amazing 18 years later (it hasn't been sanded at all). Today, I only install solid timber floors in our work purely because of personal preference and the type of renovations we are doing, and when requested by a client we have sourced from Europe. Cheers

Hi Vivien I would go for engineered timber over laminate every day of the week. The reality of laminates is that the backing is not dimensionally stable. The manufacturers have tried everything from MDF to particle board in order to keep them flat but it just doesn't work... this is why they focus on the wear layer so much.. You only have to read the care instructions where they state that you need to ensure you keep moisture away from it otherwise it will warp. Engineered floors are just that... they have layers that are set at 90 degrees to each other to allow the natural expansion and contraction of timber to be controlled by the grain layout. The finishes are quite hard also as they are factory done. As an aside, there was a product available some time ago that was a timber floor with a ceramic wear layer so hard that I used to demonstrate its durability by scratching a 10c piece across it and wearing the coin down. Not sure if anyone does it still but was called invincible... Cheers

To give another perspective, engineered wood can be sanded and refinished and is the only flooring type that adds value to your home. We have replaced an engineered floor with a new one after 15 years ( it had water damage from the dishwasher and we were replacing the kitchen, otherwise I would have had it sanded and resealed. During that time we had two kids, teens, adults, a cat and dogs rampaging across it. Just prior to replacing it had a couple of dents as well as some scratches under where we ( stupidly) had a magnetic knife block that wasn’t quite magnetic enough. Engineered floors are made with natural timber so each board is unique. Vinyl is a printed image of wood that is repeated in the floor. Pic of blackbutt from recent install.