Flooring
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Blog
How to Select the Best Flooring for Every Room in Your Home
Top Choice: Porcelain TileA natural fit for high-traffic areas of the home, porcelain tile outperforms every other flooring material we test for resistance to scratching, and it resists dents from light objects like falling utensils very well, says Li Wang, the CR engineer responsible for rating flooring. Porcelain tile comes in a range of styles to fit any decor. You…
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Blog
Best Flooring of 2025 – Consumer Reports
To test flooring for foot-traffic wear, we rub abrasive paper discs back and forth against 6×6-inch flooring samples, checking for wear every 50 cycles. The best flooring is unscathed after 500 cycles or 50,000 abrasive rubs. To test a floor’s resistance to denting, we drop a heavy, blunt weight that simulates a saucepan or large can of tomatoes, plus a…
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Blog
Most Durable Flooring for High-Traffic Areas
Generally, wood and engineered wood—that is, layers of plywood and other materials topped with a thin slice of real hardwood veneer and a protective coating—don’t stand up well in high-traffic areas. When faced with the abrasion machine in Consumer Reports’ surface-wear tests—a stand-in for the abuse of high-traffic areas—most of the prefinished solid-wood and engineered-wood products in our recent evaluations…
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