4 Reasons to Use Wood Laminate Over Genuine Timber for Your Bathroom Floor

About Me
Carrie's Construction Tips

Welcome to my blog. I'm Carrie and I would like to share some of the top tips I have learnt about construction and repair work in the home. My passion is for buying old property and carrying out work on them to bring them into the 21st century. I started out doing this a couple of years ago. I used some money I had inherited to buy a wreck of a place and if I am honest, I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I was really lucky to find some great contractors who helped me out a lot and taught me lots of very cool things.

Search

4 Reasons to Use Wood Laminate Over Genuine Timber for Your Bathroom Floor

16 October 2017
 Categories: , Blog


In most cases, people prefer natural timber over laminate wood flooring. However, those looking to add a wood floor to their bathroom should certainly consider using engineered laminate flooring over the genuine article, and here are just four important reasons why.

1. You Need it to Handle Moisture

As you've probably already worked out, any flooring that goes in the bathroom needs to handle moisture. Even if you somehow don't manage to splash any water directly on the floor from your shower or bath, the steam from hot water is still going to leave moisture across the floor. As such, genuine timber is going to prove temperamental. When it meets moisture, it tends to swell, warping the boards and potentially demanding an entire refit. Additionally, such flooring isn't watertight, so moisture can drip through to damage the subfloor. Laminate wood flooring can cope with moisture and forms a watertight barrier.

2. You Need it to be Light

In the vast majority of homes, the bathroom isn't on the ground floor – if yours is, feel free to skip to point 3. For everyone else, the fact that the bathroom is on the upper floor of your property makes using genuine timber tricky. If you've ever picked up a timber plank and a piece of laminate flooring, you'll doubtless have noticed that the laminate is far lighter. Unfortunately, the upstairs of your property may not have been designed to cope with heavy timber planks. This may mean that work needs to be done to the subfloor to even handle genuine timber flooring in the bathroom.

3. You Should Consider Underfloor Heating

Underfloor heating is becoming increasingly popular, and the bathroom is one of the most popular places to have it installed. Nothing nicer than stepping out of your morning shower onto a warm surface. Genuine timber floor doesn't accommodate underfloor heating very effectively – its thickness leaves little space for it to be fitted, and its density prevents heat rising efficiently. In contrast, engineered laminate flooring can be perfect for underfloor heating.

4. You Don't Need Something Tough

One of the central advantages held by timber over laminate is that it's a lot tougher, but you just don't need that durability and strength in the bathroom. People are rarely going to wear shoes in your bathroom, and heavy items are unlikely to be dropped on the floor. There's little point opting for genuine timber flooring in your bathroom when one of its main benefits over laminate is essentially nullified.