Floor Focus: Laminate Flooring 101

Though it’s experienced some growing pains, laminate flooring has made major strides in recent years, delivering on style, usability, and affordability. Designed to replicate the natural look of real hardwood, stone, and even patterns, laminate flooring offers the best of both worlds—impeccable style and practical features.

Though it shares several similarities with some varieties of vinyl plank, laminate flooring is unique in its construction and appearance.

 
The Benefits of Laminate Flooring

With a core made from wood byproducts bonded with resins, and a hard plastic surface protecting its printed design layer, laminate closely resembles hardwood in appearance, texture, and depth, and there’s a wide selection of laminate flooring to choose from. The cost is also highly appealing, with laminate flooring typically starting at around $1 per square foot.

LL Flooring’s Dream Home Collection, for example, offers a wide variety of colors and patterns, ranging from lighter tints like Lake Constance Beech Laminate, to medium-tone selections like Autumn Cider Oak Laminate and even darker, more sophisticated  shades like Whiskey Barrel Oak Laminate.

 
And the experts agree: LL Flooring’s laminate is both cost-effective and high-performing, with both the Autumn Cider Oak and Pewter Oak getting top ratings in Good Housekeeping’s recent roundup of Best Laminate Flooring Options.

Where to Install Laminate Flooring

Though a lot of laminate floors on the market aren’t reliably water-resistant, LL Flooring developed some of it's Dream Home laminates line for waterproof installation, making it a game-changer when it comes to selecting flooring for challenging areas in your home, including bathrooms, kitchens, mudrooms, and basements. And, with a top layer of clear aluminum oxide protecting their boards, Dream Home laminates are exceedingly stain-resistant.

It’s relatively simple to install a Dream Home floor, thanks to easy-click installation technology, and you can lay those planks over a variety of subfloors, which makes these laminate floors highly DIY-friendly.

Check out this installment of LL Style Stories, where designer Cait Pappas talks about why she went with LL Flooring’s laminate for her home project.

What do you love most about your laminate? Tag us with #LLStyle!