https://www.mtcopeland.com
Humans have been using wood for flooring for thousands of years. For most of that time the wood was cut into planks that served as both the structural floor, as well as the finished wear surface. As manufacturing processes advanced and hardwoods became more scarce, we began milling the wood into planks that were attached to a structural sub floor. Today an engineered wood floor offers the best solution for floor stability, subfloor adaptability, cost and conservation.
Since solid hardwood floor planks are milled from a single piece of wood, they are very susceptible to movement with changing moisture content, can only be stable in narrow widths, and cannot be glued directly to a concrete slab.
Engineered wood floors, on the other hand, have a plywood backing that is very dimensionally stable, allowing for the planks to be very long and wide while remaining dimensionally stable. European Wide Plank floors are a direct result of an engineered planks inherent stability.
A common negative raised about engineered hardwood flooring is inability to refinish. While this is true for wear layers under 2MM, most high quality engineered floors are able to be refinished multiple times, as long as their wear layers are greater than 2MM. A 56MM wear layer can be refinished as many times as a solid wood floor, and will have all the other benefits of an engineered wood floor.
It's the best of all worlds!