We had an engineered wood floor that was easily scratched and as it was sold as … “you can sand down scratches and stain”….was not true. Maybe there are some good ones out there… our experience was disappointing.

Also… at installation, the floor level was a bit off and there were unattractive gaps in the door frame and room wall moldings at the floor that had to be fixed.

Good you are investigating your options. Good luck.

That’s really good to know! We put “luxury” vinyl tile in our kitchen five years ago and it is destroyed. I know it’s the not the same material but these newer materials that seem so strong in the showroom don’t always hold as well as promised.

For me it would really depend on where the mismatch was located…across the middle of a room or in a doorway? I could live with the tile/wood height difference in a doorway with the right threshold, I could live with two not the same looking wood floors meeting in a doorway, I wouldn’t want one room to have a mismatch.

Upstairs does not need to match downstairs. I’d keep the wood downstairs.

Also, if the area being covered meets the stairs, wouldn’t it cause issues with the stair treads/ landing (and/or if there’s any railing at the top level…)?
Just random thoughts…

The new upstairs addition is a just big dormer in the shape of a rectangle that doesn’t span the entire length of the house and comes off the back. The entire upstairs has the sloped roof walls but in the area of the addition the ceiling is at normal height. The area was an attic crawl space and never had flooring.

About 2/3 of the dormer is going to be a bathroom so it will be a different room and there will be a one inch step up through the door.

But 1/3 of the new area that has no flooring (about 40 sq feet) will not be partitioned off from the rest of the bedroom with a door. The contractor thought about using that area as a closet but there is a window on the dormer at that location and we didn’t want to lose the natural light. So the little space will have three walls but be open to the room. We were thinking about making it into a little seating area with two chairs and a table for reading. I thought it might look ok to have carpet there if we can’t match the old pine wood.

To Chris’s comment - yes covering the area would cause issues with the stairs and we would replace the staircase if we went that route.

Sounds like carpet would be fine.

Carpet or a large rug would be fine. I like the old floors and I wouldn’t rip out the old floors just for a small space that would be different. On the bathroom issue— one of our bathrooms has a one inch floor difference too and it’s totally fine.

Post pics when you are finished with your project! I’d love to see how those floors look when they are finished.