What are laminate floors?

So, be honest: how often do you walk into someone’s home who’s just had laminate flooring installed, stop and go, “Oh my God, what’s that?” Okay, no one does that, but I bet you’re wondering now! Not many people think that flooring and laminate aren’t exactly brand new, so most don’t really give much thought to what they’re made of. However, there are always those of us who are curious, so if you are one of them, read on.

What is the difference between laminate flooring and Pergo?

Let’s get this out of the way: Pergo and laminate flooring are the same thing. You have to respect a brand that is known in a sector as competitive as flooring, but Pergo is nothing more than a brand of laminate flooring. People tend to start calling things by their brand name as that is what is advertised the most, but calling Pergo laminate flooring is like calling all soft drinks Coca-Cola or Pepsi. So when someone says they have Pergo, you know what they’re really saying is laminate flooring, but you wouldn’t point it out as some people will just argue the point.

Laminate floors are not real hardwood

But at the same time, they are. While they’re not hardwood, and there are ways to tell, there are some higher-quality floors that you really have to take a look at with a magnifying glass to really tell. There is certainly real wood mixed in there, as laminate flooring is based on a wood chip composite material, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. If you can’t tell if the floor is real wood or laminate, use your knuckles to knock on it. Laminate will make a plastic sounding tick, and the wood ones are more like a thud or thud.

Laminate flooring is designed to look like hardwood flooring.

In essence, a laminate floor is an image of a hardwood floor, only glued to a much stronger material. Laminate floors excel at surviving the very conditions that make hardwood-floor owners whistle through their teeth in dismay. Scuffs, scratches, and scuffs are still possible, but much less likely and much easier to repair if necessary. In homes where there is a lot of child or pet traffic, real wood flooring is becoming obsolete and cumbersome by comparison.

Laminate Floors And Traditional Lamination

Yes, they are both derivatives of the same process, called lamination. Most people think of lamination as basically the act of putting paper into plastic, but that’s a very watered down definition. If you put plastic around your cell phone and glued or heat sealed it, you would have laminated your cell phone, which would be ridiculous or funny depending on the circumstances. In the case of laminate flooring, plastic surrounds and protects a wooden photograph which then sits, quite amusingly, on a base of wood chips. The result is almost all of the benefits of hardwood flooring with some of the drawbacks.