Wood Flooring
 

Any recommendations for a contractor to remove carpeting and install wood flooring in a Villages home?

East Coast Flooring. Did my whole house and were great

Agree
 

East Coast Flooring are excellent

Wood flooring is generally not a good product to use in Florida, because of the humidity.

You're likely to have better luck with an engineered product.

Would vinyl planking be a better alternative?

If you click on "Search Forums" on the top bar next to "Grocery Delivery" you will be able to learn lots about flooring. Also, Ruth Dyer, an interior decorator, writes a column every Wednesday in the "Home and Garden" section. She has written that column every week since we moved here in 2008 and it talks a lot about flooring appropriate for the houses built in this area.

Highest on her list of for lasting beauty is "wood like" engineered flooring.. You can go to any well equipped floor store like Great Lakes, Roberto's, The Floor Shoppe, etc. and look at the different examples and talk to sales people. Engineered wood takes the prize for beauty and for the fact a transition strip is not needed when joining it to ceramic or porcelain tile, since it is the same height.

Laminate is more economical and can be very attractive, but is not supposed to get wet. And Luxury Vinyl Plank is more tolerant of normal moisture, such as mopping, but also more costly. But both require transition strips to join the tile, which are vexing, since in our case there are eight of them.

Here is a good hint from the column: When shopping, compare a samples of laminate or LVP to a sample of engineered wood you like in a similar pattern to determine which synthetic comes closest to looking most authentic next to the wood.

Finally, having been on TOTV for such a long time, East Coast Flooring has earned praise through the years. Good luck with your shopping.

East Coast Floors
 

Mary and I installed "Real Oak" Engineered flooring made by Bruce. We installed it 16 years ago. No Problems. It has aged to a beautiful shade of Honey Oak. It's a glue down product engineered and laminated to resist warping. We have used this same product in three homes over the last 30 years. No Problems. It is also made in America No Chinese glue.

Call East Coast Flooring. They will advise you of your options. They have great installers.
Len & Mary the retired half of IPC

Wood flooring looks great.
Engineered Oak is marvelous.
But!
The noise when walking on it in anything other than soft bottom footwear is awful.
Top quality Vinyl is so much better.
( We have tried them all.)
JMO.

We had our bedrooms done in wood flooring in 2012 and it still looks brand new. No marks or scratches. Floor Master on 301 in Wildwood do the job.

Personally, I prefer Laminate. It's easy to put down, reasonably price and easy to remove, if you want to change it at some point.

As someone else mentioned, Engineered Hardwood is a possibility. It can look great, but I've found it less durable and hard to fix if you have a problem. That said, it looks the closest to real wood.

LVP is all the rage in lower priced homes. It's a great product, but bears little or no semblance to real wood. One of the major reasons for my preference for Laminate, is you can get a "glossy" type finish ... there's no such thing in LVP. The finish is always dull. You can throw some wax on it and get a little shine, but it will be gone in the morning.

Wood Floors
 

Its glued down. No hollow clomping noise. Just like the wood floors up North. Len

So was ours, but our Grands still sounded like a team of Shire Horses running about.

Great Lakes.
I would use Luxury Vinyl Plank

From home investment, go with new 22mil vinyl plank. Ask any realtor. Get quotes from at least three places. Roberto’s was having a great sale. Ours is going down today. We did not check East coast price.

Laminate has been recommended by many of the home installers over “luxury vinyl.”