Seems way low to me for the demo, disposal, required floor prep, and new flooring installed too.

Is the cottage by the water?

cottage (really a house) 3 blocks from the harbor. The water that we get is mostly spills of bottles, sink overflow etc

the floor folks want to put in a plywood subfloor, then the engineered wood on top. Take off the laminate and then use the present subfloor there as a base

engineered is fine. could be better than solid if you're worried about moisture (The wood they used 100 years ago was a lot denser than what we have now)

Is 10K everything? demo/new flooring/install? that's actually pretty good.

I would not do laminate. IT's a downgrade

Yes no laminate or LVT. Do solid hardwood or a good quality engineered. If your price includes demo, prep and engineered wood floor it may be a very low quality product. Good to get 3 bids and do your homework re product.

If this is a vacation cottage I would do LVP. Do you really want to enjoy your time at the cottage or play floor police while you are there.

Well seeing that they are looking to replace those wood floors after 100 years I don’t think they’ll have to worry about policing too much with real wood. Vinyl floors on the other hand will definitely be replaced within 10 years.

Engineered would probably do better with the moisture, but for authenticity small slat hardwood would be the ticket.

Have you already looked at and dismissed the other flooring options, e.g. ceramic tile, true linoleum, etc.?

We have ceramic tile in in our Florida condo. We like it there but didn’t think would be in style in Newport. That being said, ceramic tile was actually less expensive

Second home for us in the summer.

Hi delay, I was in Newport just the other day! I am at the other end of the state in Westerly and understand how the moisture and weather near the water here is! A couple Nor’ Easters can really drench you! Being that Newport is such a fabulous vacation destination and your home is older I think hardwood would be appropriate especially for resale. Many of the older cottages here have wood floors and they just seem right. Even when then finish gets worn by beach sand over the years they just take on a softer character.

Beth, I think that’s true about older wood! An older cottage we owned had beautiful long leaf yellow pine floors. You can only get those today from reclaimed sources. Those floors are still in that cottage( saw them recently) and still lovely!

I would do solid hardwood and stay true to the character of the home. Hickory would be the hardest of the domestic woods.

Would it be worth putting in hardwood. We have many 100 + cottages on our lakes outside the city. They were built by the upper class to escape the summer heat of the city. The wife and kids stayed the summer and the husbands would take the train out on weekends. The cottages were built cheaply and small since it was only used for 3 - 4 months of the year. With wood rot, installation of plumbing and electric any of the character has been long gone.

I would do site-finish 2 1/4" solid rift and quarter white oak, lightly wire brushed with an extra coat of matte. Allow 1" expansion gap along perimeters. Stay away from Maple and Hickory in your area. These species are not stable enough, compared to oak.

+1 on G & S Floor Service 's recommendation. Rift & Quartered White Oak is going to be even more stable than regular Plain Sawn White Oak. The narrower width will also help. Being a Solid floor you can refinish it again in the future.

Educational Plank Flooring Examples · More Info

Educational Plank Flooring Examples · More Info

+2 on G & S Floor Service 's recommendation. Narrower boards are less likely to cup and use more fasteners, rift and quarter sawn cut is more stable, and White Oak not only looks nice, it's less porous than Red Oak. Done right it should last another 100 years and not be obscenely expensive.

My question is , is this a summer cottage area or full time occupation mostly/ I think if it is cottages mostly used in the summer I would do vinyl plank easy to install , easy to keep clean and sort of water proof .

I'm in an expensive area (a bachelor apt. of 550sf = $300K; a single family home = $1.1Mill and it is a 'handyman special'; the 'tear down' = $900K). The price you are looking at is on the lower end. If we do the math with the numbers in MY area you will see how things work: Right now a quote for 550 sq is roughly $18.50/sf to do it ALL including the cost of hardwood + install ($10,000/550sf = $18.18/sf).

Remove/dispose of old hardwood & Laminate: $2/sf

Lay 2 LAYERS of subfloor (assuming there isn't one under the wood) = $4 - $5/sf

Shim/level everything (including kitchen area before renovation): $2/sf

Before you have purchased the hardwood your 'work' has already cost you $8-$9/sf. A 'nice' engineered hardwood STARTS at $10/sf + 2/sf for installation (depending on the type of installation required).

$8.50/sf (prep) + $12/sf = $20.50/sf = $11,275. And these are numbers for a house that is in relatively nice shape. There is nothing 'extra ordinary' in these numbers. If something 'weird' is going on then these prices go up QUICKLY.

Personally I like the idea of going with a 2" narrow strip hardwood (oak of some sort) that is site finished. The material costs = $4-$5/sf and the installation/finishing will be around the same for a total of (roughly) $10/sf. Narrow strip hardwood is super cheap to come by because it is NOT fashionable...yet it is STILL solid hardwood! Your resale value will be maintained as well as look of your century-old home will be preserved.

SJ - what are your thought on who makes a "nice" engineered wood? Site finished may require all the downstairs furniture to be outside

"cottages' in Newport run about $500-600K. They may have been working class homes 100 years ago, but now most of the market here is second/vacation homes

Try Somerset, who offers solid prefinished and a decent engineered at reasonable prices.

https://somersetfloors.com/pages/colorStrip.html#/images/collections/roomScenes/colorstrip/room_colorstrip_natredoak.jpg

Newport says it all. I'm guessing your area is considered 'expensive' just by the zip code.

I cringe at the thought of engineered wood in a 100 year old house. Our floors are original 165 year old heart pine, also down to nearly saw dust, cannot be refinished again. I have had many flooring contractors come in and the idea I like the best was using the current flooring as a subfloor and putting reclaimed wood on top of it. (Maybe not a good idea since you have cupping.)

I don't know much about wood floors or their constructions but could the cupping be due to structural issues instead of dampness?

I have lived in homes with hardwood floors my entire life, consider them very easy to care for, no policing or water fears involved.

Do you know what neighbors have done? Always good to look at other homes in the area built around the same time, if you can find ones that haven't been completely gutted or renovated.

And yes, $10k sounds in the ballpark to me.

Kendrah maybe you are confusing ‘engineered wood’ with laminate? There are engineered wood products (keyword being wood) that can withstand the fluctuations in temperature much better than solid wood and it will still give you the look and feel of solid wood. Those wood floors (3mm or more face veneer thickness) are typically much more expensive than a standard stained and finished in place red oak floor. So no need to cringe about engineered wood. But go ahead and cringe all you like for laminate or wood look vinyl. And never use an old wood floor as a subfloor for a new one - not only do you have an uneven / unstable subfloor but you run into flooring thickness issues (think of a dishwasher and built in fridge not fitting / clearance under doors). It’s just not the right way to do it.

My problem with engineered is the off gassing of the adhesives used to
bind the layers. (Ever since I went through chemo I have horrible
reactions to a lot of glues and adhesives. I like that with solid wood I
don't have to worry about that. It is more environmentally friendly
overall.)

Not sure about the OP, I assume this is the same for all old houses - the door frames, baseboards, walls, etc are all solid wood and plaster so they fluctuate with the temperature anyway. As do the floors that have been in place for well over a century. It just makes sense to me to use solid wood even though it expands and contracts because the same is true for the rest of the house anyway. I'm curious if the cupping of the OP's floor is just the floor itself or if the subfloor is shifting along with the foundation. We don't have subfloors in our house currently. Just the hardwood on top of joists.

It seems standard practice here in Philadelphia to use the old floor as a subfloor - I have had many contractors suggest it. Maybe it is a regional thing or a historic house thing? I'm curious if others have had the same recommendations and the age of their house and where they live.

the laminate floor in the kitchen is cupping due to a few water spills that seeped between the boards - causing the laminate substrate to swell. i don't want that repeated on the new floor, so i am unsure of engineered woods suitability for a kitchen

Laminate is a product that has a photograph of wood sitting on paper pulp (aka MDF or HDF). It is the middle layer of paper pulp (MDF or HDF) that REALLY hates water. It soaks it up like a sponge and then puffs like oat meal. Once it puffs it stays 'puffed'. This swelling looks like the edges are puffing up (and possible the photograph begins to lift to reveal the paper pulp underneath). These are almost always seen with spilled moisture (especially in front of a dishwasher).

An engineered hardwood has real wood sitting on top of real wood sitting on real wood (layers look like plywood). This is a very different product. It takes QUITE A BIT of water to get the edges to cup or swell. In fact, 'cupping' is a distinct issue (the edges of the plank sit higher than the middle and are not normally associated with water spills).

Please upload some photos of the kitchen floor. That will straighten out some of the difference between laminate and engineered hardwood. Some photos will help us help you.

Another reason to get site-finished floors. You can avoid the vulnerable seams.

Engineered is hardwood applied to a good quality plywood. I liive on Cape and engineered is the only way for you to go (in the wood family). I copied this from the Spruce blog;

Engineered wood is better than solid hardwood at dealing with moisture. Its plywood base is dimensionally stable, meaning that it warps and flexes less easily upon contact with moisture than solid wood. Fibers in plywood run in cross-wise layers, a far more stable structure than solid wood's parallel fibers.

We owned an 1820 half Cape. It came with original wide plank pine floors which were in tough shape. My builder flipped them over and had them refinished. Gorgeous!

Next house, same neighborhood, 200 yds from the water. This house was new build and I chose Homerwood engineered hickory in Saddle (refinished, no mess, and no guessing about the color). Gorgeous!

100 yr old cottage sounds so old to someone young, but 1919 is pretty flexible for design, unless you are talking about a distinct/authetic design vintage home.

Choose what you like, but that close to the water…go engineered. It won’t cup and you can wet (wrung out) mop it when needed. Use Bona.

Our present home, not Historic and came with a pool, I used wood look white porcelain. Gorgeous.

Love Newport..my daughter is Navy…Thames for food and shopping, yeah!

I'm a natural wood fan, especially in a 100-year old home. Our 90+ year old primary home is on Long Island, a very humid climate, and our 2 1/2" strip flooring is doing just fine. We also have reclaimed antique heart pine in our newly built family room, and it is also doing just fine. Our renovated kitchen is 3" and 5" natural white oak.

Our home is totally air conditioned, which counteracts any humidity in the air, so if the OP's home is climate-controlled as well, I don't see any problem with solid, natural, site-finished floors.

There are quite a few antique/reclaimed flooring companies, one of which is Carlisle, close to you in New Hampshire. I'd check them out.

Diana Bier Interiors, LLC is very right. Climate controls play a big part in the flooring care. I also would not completely throw out the idea of very high quality Engineered. If its American made with a thick wear layer and CARB II compliant its really the best of both worlds. A thick wear layer that can be refinished again and again plus its more stable to resist movement associated with humidity swings.

Another reclaimed wood company that might be closer is Longleaf Lumber in Cambridge, MA