Laminate Timber Floor Experiences???

We have gone around for our first look at flooring places today to see what type of wood floor we should have upstairs in our bedrooms and second living area. Both floor places we went to recommended laminate flooring as the most durable and hardwearing. Our other option is probably bamboo, or one place did try and talk us into Brease (allergy and asthma sensitive carpet).

I am reluctant with laminate - for some reason laminate just has a bad name in my head, although I actually have no experience with it! Can anyone who has laminate floors tell me how you have found them? Does furniture dent it? Do they scratch easily? Easy to look after?

Can anyone tell me how they compare to bamboo?

Thank you!

what about engineered hardwood, e.g. oak? should be a good fit for your bedrooms.

laminate is just a plastic with "printed" wood on it.

bamboos are good, but a bit on a hard side, oak is much softer.

If we are going hard floors, I really want a floor that is not going to dent when furniture sits on top of it. I want to be able to rearrange layouts of rooms and move furniture about without having floor dents left behind. From what I have been told, woods like oak would leave dents in the floor. Bamboo is another option but is more expensive than laminate and not as hard wearing?

Consider investing couple of bucks into furniture pads...

Hey! We have had laminate floor for about 7 years. It's very hardy, only dent we have (and it's small) husband sat on a child's chair with our then two year old son on lap. It collapsed and a screw under the chair put a dent. See very extreme situation.

We have decided on laminate again. With kids and pets it's the best option for us!

It's a wide board blackbutt laminate from Carpet Court. Good variances in boards and we think it looks good.

Good luck with what you decide.

Laminate is not plastic, you may have confused with something else.

We are looking at our flooring options too at the moment and will hopefully go for engineered timber which is a more cost effective solution than actual timber boards. Otherwise we are considering laminate as that comes included in our package. However speaking to Harvey Norman, we were told laminate is actually not water proof if it buckles or any of the joints let water in. Only the top surface is water proof.

Another thing to consider is scotia beading with laminate floors which also goes around kitchen bench. I recommend you find a display home with laminate flooring and take a look at that. Our builder will eliminate scotia beading if we leave the kitchen kickboards off and someone comes in later to install them and also go for wider skirting boards rather than standard, you can get rid of requiring beading. Good luck.