To
really do it right, you need to also let the new floor 'season' in your living space. Buy it and keep it neatly stacked (not so it's bent!) near the room(s) it'll be installed in for at least a week. Move all the furniture in the space into another room the night before you're planning to work.
Thanks guys! Right now we have carpet throughout the place and it's in pretty good condition (I think the previous owners installed it new before we moved in but that was back in 2007). There's the standard foam padding underneath and I think it's cement under that. So I'd remove all the carpet and padding right?
Rip all that carpet stuff out, yes. And the tack strips - those can be a bear, but a friend and I tore out 300 s.f. of carpet, pad, and tack strip in a couple hours. While you're doing it,
carefully pull off the baseboards or quarter rounds as indicated up thread. Those should take another couple hours by themselves, especially if your baseboards need to be cut to remove without wrecking your paint.
And then lay tar paper and or new padding before installing the wood or laminate flooring?
Eh... not sure if tar paper qualifies as underlayment. Ask your suppler for proper underlayment. Mine was some kind of plastic, just roll it out and cut it to fit your room(s). If the room is upstairs, either get flooring with built-in pad or ask about sound-damping padding - you might need to look around for it, I think I've specified 'acousti-mat' before, but I have no idea where you buy it from. That took maybe an hour.
It sounds like the click flooring might be the best way to go for me. The only thing I'm not so sure about is where to stash all our furniture and what order to do stuff in. Should we tackle the smaller part (hallway) first and then do the larger living room area after? We'd probably have to move everything into the kitchen and/or bedrooms. I just wouldn't want to put myself in a situation where we aren't able to finish the flooring before the day ends and having to figure out where/how to move stuff back into the space or work around all of it.
Pack everything into as few rooms as possible. We stacked our whole living and dining room into a den. You'd be surprised how much stuff fits in a room when getting into it isn't important. If you have to, move people out - my SO went to her parents for the weekend so she wouldn't need to deal with the construction mess. If you've got kids, send them to friends/family if possible.
Also, how do you determine what direction to lay the planks? I'm assuming usually it's along the length of the hallway. And if the hallway runs out to the living room, for it to flow best, it should probably continue flowing the same general direction instead of making sort of an "L").
Usually the longest dimension of your space should go the same way as the long dimension of the planks. Ask your supplier for advice though. You shouldn't change directions unless you absolutely have to - wood shrinks and expands a bit with temperature/humidity, so if you have to change directions, do it in an opening (door, entry to a hallway, narrow spot) with a transition.
BTW: is laminate really waterproof? I've read around that it can warp from water spills and things like that, and that engineered wood floors are typically more durable. ...Also, I read that the floor needs to be spaced a bit from the edges to allow for expansion and breathability or something like that. Is that what those clear plastic spacers (or just pieces of wood) are that people use to keep some space between the edges of the walls, etc?
All wood shrinks and expands from exposure to moisture. Leave 1/2" or so (or per your supplier) between your floor and the walls - we just winged it and it worked fine. My floor has proven to be quite water resistant (spills, cleaning, etc. don't do anything), but I wouldn't want to flood it.
Laminate is probably more durable but less long-lasting - it's harder to damage than just about any wood, but if you do you can't fix it short of tearing out the marred planks. Engineered is going to dent and scratch more easily but you have actual wood to use to help hide the marring, and you can try to sand it out. I actually heard that
real wood isn't much better than
engineered as far as repair-ability - you only have 1/4" or so till you hit nails. Engineered only has about that much before you burn through the 'nice' wood topping.
What would the best type of wood be either way? Oak?
Any of the so-called 'Ironwood' species - Brazilian Walnut, Ipe, etc. - are the 'hardest.' Pine, Fir, Maple and Oak are traditional in the US. Bloodwood, Padook, and Purpleheart are cool colors. Laminate will outperform anything short of an exotic for impact resistance.
Here's a chart showing the relative hardness of flooring woods with links to specifics and images. Higher Janka hardness = harder. Traditional woods aren't actually all that hard (hardness +/- 1300), and I'm sure you've seen how well they hold up.
Really, what matters most there is what you like the look of best - some woods can be stained darker, but already dark woods can't easily be stained lighter. If you want dark floors, get a dark wood. Light floors, get a light wood.