Please do not put plastic of any kind under furniture or filing cabinets. Plastic can draw sap from the wood floor and make it sticky. This happened to drawers in my new house bathroom. Plastic chair mats for office chairs might do the same thing. The plastic mats are o.k. on tile floors or carpet.

If you want your sofa to remain stationary, don't use felt pads or it will scoot across the floor when you sit on it. I use felt pads on dining chairs and occasional tables, and on very heavy pieces (like TV cabinets) that won't move with casual contact. But be aware, you need to keep them clean or they will hold grit and act like sandpaper. Furniture "cups" come in square and round, in many sizes, in brown and tan and clear and wood. I have them under anything with legs or casters. They are also available with "teeth" for use on rugs. I bought most of my furniture protectors at Home Depot.

I've dealt with 30 year old engineered floors with the original finish, and a couple of screening and topcoating over it. If you take care of floors and don't let kids play roller hockey indoors, you too will never need to do a sand and refinish. The idea of "refinishing" as a criteria for choosing your floors is not really a valid concern. Choose a quality major brand, and you won't have any worries. No LL or box store crapola. $5-6 a square foot and up is where the good stuff starts. Under that, you can get some OK buys, but you're generally gonna have to do a lot more homework to make sure. So, what does "taking care of your floors" entail? Vacuuming a couple of times a week. Not allowing food and drink outside of the kitchen. Using rugs at all entries to capture the dirt from outside. Being a no shoes indoor household helps a lot too, but I'm not going to get into that classic arguement. Don't mop your floors. You can damp clean them, but people get all hung up over sloshing water on top of wood, and that's just a comple no no. Use something like a Bona cleaner a couple of times a month, max. Every other type of cleaning should be spot cleaning. But with food and drink confined to the appropriate spot, spills are minimized. Abrasion from debris is minimized by rugs that you frequently clean. And in 8-12 years, you do a refresher of a screening and recoating. You don't need to sand down to bare wood at all. Unless you don't do the above and wear through to bare wood.

Hi Wendy, "Yes" to answer your question. Just make sure that you have left the proper space around the room for expansion. Most engineered floors require 1/8" to 1/4" gap or space. This can be covered with your base or shoe molding. Hope this answers your question. Chris @ Nicefloors.com