re garding these veneer floors on plywood; I have a company in Rhode Island
that does
architectural restoration ... 17th, 18th & 19th century buildings, and as
you might guess I'm a believer in using materials that are appropriate to
the period. A few years ago we were called in to look at a french chateau in
which an architect had persuaded the owners to install the latest floating
pre-finished wonder floor from Sweden, an 1/8" oak veneer over plywood. It
looked great - except that the house was a summer house, closed up from Oct
- May and there had been a roof leak all winter which ruined probably 5% of
the floor area but as luck would have it the finish was last years' hot
model which they didn't make any more. So they ended up having to replace
about 2000sq.ft. of floor - 95% of which was undamaged ... the moral of the
story is to bet on the horse with a track record. The "latest" isn't
necessarily the best, and I can tell you that stuff doesn't like water.

Jim

Lashway wrote:

> >However. They have problems with moisture. Also and wood or laminate
> >> flooring is going to add weight. So that's a minus for me. I've
> >> decided that we should go with vinyl. A wood floor design but not the
> >> downside of laminates.
> Bit of a followup on my last message about parquet floors. The concern
> about weight regarding wood verus other materials is "immaterial". Some
> weeks back we had a discussion and various weight of products was shown
> and the variance in weight per sq. ft. really makes this a non-issue. If
> I recall their was a difference of 60 or 70 lbs between the lightest and
> heaviest. I can't dig all this data up but you can check it out
> yourself with specs. available from your flooring supplier. Taks a bit
> of simple arithmetic but is not a rocket scientist problem.
>
> All the rumors being spread about Pergot and water damage is just that.
> No one has yet shown it to be fact and a lot of conclusions are drawn
> simply because the material is a laminate. Look at our a/s trailer
> floors, they are all the plywood laminate. The same arguements were
> made years ago when it came on the market. I think many of our trailer
> owners because of inexperience in the use of water due to limitations of
> fresh water holding tanks have developed a psycohis (sp) about water and
> are convinced that even a little bit of water is distructive..
>
> Roy