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.

It is an extreme disservice to the consumer to suggest that engineered floors are somehow inferior to solid wood. A quality engineered floor with a 3/8" (or more) top layer of the desirable wood potentially as durable to the end user as is solid wood. Solid wood can only be sanded down to the tongue thickness, and this equates essentially to 3/8". A engineered floor is just as durable as is solid wood to someone wanting long term usage out of a floor and imprisoned to slab construction. The prefinished vs. site finished issue is a completely different issue. Some people like the "touchupability" of an oil finish. It's a LOT more work and harder on the consumer to go with site finished. For some, using an old fashioned finish like tung oil is worth the inconvenience for the authenticity given. For anyone considering wood flooring and at all concerned with "green" design, a factory finished engineered wood floor comes out head and shoulders above solid site finished. Engineered uses less of the "face" wood, and more of the ply layers resulting in stretching the usage of the more valuable wood. Prefinished also has a much more durable finish that is NOT able to be duplicated on site because of the restrictions on the types of finishes available to finishers and homeowners. A more durable finish applied in factory controlled conditions releases less VOC into the atmosphere while providing a significantly harder wear layer. Either choice can be a good one, or a great one, depending on the quality of the materials chosen and the expertise of the installer. They go together, and choosing poorly on either will result in a less attractive or durable floor.

If you are going to drop stuff on a wood floor and expect it not to dent, you should either get a harder wood, a textured wood that doesn't show dents as readily, or get something that's not wood. If you're getting a wood floor and expect it not to scratch, get something else. I've been doing Mirage for maybe 15 years and have no problems with the quality of their products. My major complaints would be that long ago they had quite a lot of short boards and their smooth products are so smooth that the look a bit fake and show dents and scratches more readily.

Joseph C. your reponse did give me a chuckle. However i fully understand this is not a space shuttle - precisely why i wanted to understand what is acceptable and what is not :) Thanks Cinar, Johnson, and SJ Mccarthy for objective answers. SJ again love your detailed answer. This is our first wood floor and my expectations were based on a roughly 300-400 sq ft of anderson engineered wood floor we ripped out in one area to put in this new one. That floor had zero gaps over 6-7 years and i could not put in a paper if i wanted to. I was thinking if one installer did it, other can too. SJ Mccarthy addresses that accurately. It was a not a distressed floor and had a flat finish and that could be the difference. I have seen distressed wood floors in large houses in last 2 weeks and they have zero gaps too. Perhaps they have filler put in which makes sense now based on all your responses. To give you guys better perspective, in 1100Sq ft of new install there were many areas with the gaps. Of course pictures i posted earlier were meant to be examples of smaller gaps only and not all problem areas. I noticed all of these gaps within 48 hours of install. My contractor says these gaps could not have appeared afterwards and would be from right during install as weather has not changed much and glue down wont let wood move so much so quickly. I was trying to get your opinion on whether replacement is worth it and I have my answer now. I think i have my answer now. Thanks all for input. Very helpful. So you folks have some perspective, there are some areas that are visible standing up and in right lighting. These are the ones the contractor said are install problem and should be fixed. and based on all of your inputs, I think i can have a better and practical discussion with him. Just for fun here is a picture I had put together for my contractor to review the work. There are about 8-10 credit cards.