We have actually held off on putting rugs in most of the rooms we’ve redone. In the case of the family room, it’s because we have guinea pigs in that room, and it’s a whole lot easier to sweep up after the stuff that gets kicked onto the floor, than it would be to vacuum. In the case of the kids’ rooms, we haven’t yet because part of the rationale there is to reduce allergens.
We do have a cheap runner in the front hallway as it’s a high-traffic area and it’ll save a bit of wear and tear. We’ll probably put a runner on the stairs when we redo them for the same reason.
When we bought our house, it was all carpeted except for the kitchen and bathrooms. We have animals and allergies, so we wanted to put in something that wouldn’t hold the dander as much.
Slowly, we are upgrading the entire house. The first floor is (finally) done, we replaced all the carpet with hardwood and did the kitchen and bathroom in tile. We did all the work ourselves, which saved money, but took lots of time. Personally, I think the investment in wood floors is worth it. It is “cleaner” than carpet and looks better IMHO.
Eventually, we would like to replace the carpet upstairs with wood. It all depends on how long we stay in this house. With the market slow, we will probably stay here another 2-3 years, so it may just make sense to wait it out and put in new carpet when we put the house up for sale.
Just noticed this, and I think this is a good plan. Basements can be chilly, also hardwood on a concrete slab has to be a different variety and is tougher to install - it can’t be nailed down. I think it usually has to be a composite (hardwood top / some sort of backing), can’t be nailed down, etc.
What are you planning on doing on the mid-level (assuming you’re in a 3-level townhouse)? As another poster noted, consider putting hardwood on that mid-level as well. If you can only swing hardwood on one level, do it on the mid-level and leave the bedrooms carpeted for now. They’re lower-traffic anyway, and often you’re not wearing shoes in the bedroom, so carpet in bedrooms holds up better anyway.
The basement is the one place where we’re happy to put mid-grade carpet, since we don’t spend much time down there and don’t expect the rug to get much wear. The mid level is split into two areas, the kitchen/bump-out (both tiled), and the living room/entry way. The small entry way is wood, but the living room is carpeted (somewhat newly, as of three years ago), along with the stairs going up, and the upstairs hallway. So we kind of screwed ourselves–if we want wood (which we do, for all of the positive reasons everyone else has noted), we can only do it two general places: the basement and the bedrooms. The basement is out, because of the cement slab, and that leaves only the bedrooms, which it seems will be a little bizarre to do over with wood (we were hoping the general reaction would be more of a ‘no biggie,’ than ‘what are they hiding?’–thanks, Jodi) That bad news, along with my suspicion that in this market wood is more of a money pit than a solid investment, is making me lean way toward carpet for everywhere.
I think people still like hardwood floors, my house has them in every room except bathrooms and kitchen, and people always comment on them.
Carpeting is nice and cozy, but it’s inevitable that it will be trouble in the future. With hardwood floors you can always put down area rugs if you want more coziness.
We have tile, and for slipperyness it makes a huge difference…what shoes I’m wearing. For instance, my new Teva’s are great on wet rough surfaces; rockish paths. However, these Teva’s + wet tile floor = guaranteed accident. With my other Teva’s, no problem at all.
All I say is, tiles are practical, and if you have such a floor and find it slippery, changing your shoes is cheaper then changing the floor.
Have you considered cork? I once lived in a house with cork floors, and it was warm and soft underfoot, and insulated against noise and heat/cold. If you dropped a glass, it would just bounce. Very easy to clean, like hardwood. Plus cork is a sustainable wood product.
How expensive is it, compared to vinyl or hardwood?
How much maintenance is required?
I have hardwood floors in my kitchen, and hate it. Water and food get spilled in the kitchen, which to me makes any flooring that might be damaged by that a dumb choice. I want flooring where I don’t have to be sure to immediately wipe up any spilled water.
I like the look of the floor under the cat in the top picture on this site. I was considering Stainmaster vinyl flooring that is supposed to look like cork for my kitchen. But if cork doesn’t require too much maintenance, having dropped glasses bounce on it would be a major advantage. Our house features two klutzes who might like to have a little klutzoid or two one of these days, so anything that protects stuff against breaking is a good thing. Just as an example of the need for klutz-friendliness in our house, I put carpet on our stairs which used to be hardwood- carpet with a pad is softer for the inevitable falls down the stairs, and it hurts less.
We have under-floor heating in our kitchen. Can you have that with a cork floor?
We also have the main door to the outside in the kitchen. How durable is cork with respect to ice-melting crystals? We use the pet-safe ones around the house in the winter when it snows. We think those are easier on floors, but that stuff does get tracked in. Would that be a problem with a cork floor?
How well does cork flooring mix with pets with claws?
Hardwoods would include maple and oak. Softwoods would include pine and fir. Some people say “hardwood” generically for any wood floor, because I don’t think they know the difference.
I looked into Laminates when I redid the floors in a large part of my house. The problem with laminates is that they look like wood, and cost like wood, but they don’t feel like wood or sound like wood, so it’s obvious they are fake. The cost difference is very minimal unless you get really cheap stuff, and if you’re getting really cheap stuff, it’s not going to look much like wood anyhow.
My original (1930s) wood floors are heart of pine. They’re beautiful and I love them, but sometimes I think you could scratch them with your fingernails.
We just put in a bamboo wood floor in our living room because the price was right (free!), and while I love the end result and love that it is a sustainable wood, too, I don’t think I would put any hardwood in again. We have linoleum in the rest of the main floor, and I love it. I think I would prefer laminate in the living room and linoleum for the rest of the house above the basement. As teela says, today’s laminates really are fantastic. It’s easy to give a room a completely different look with relatively cheap area rugs, too.
We’re in the process of selling our house right now, and I haven’t heard a single comment that people would prefer carpets upstairs. Another factor with carpets is that a lot of people have kids with allergies/asthma now - not a concern with floors you can swiffer easily and not have them collect allergens.
I do like to have carpet in the basement for the warmth, though. Not expensive ones, though. It’s still a basement.
Yeah! I just got back from the store, where I bought a big wide floor swiffer-y thing - I forget the actual name, but it’s made by Clorox. It’s easy-peasy to clean this new laminate floor. I just walk up and down quickly, pushing the big square flat mop with its microfiber cloth-covered head, and voila, three rooms are clean in less than five minutes. For washing, Armstrong’s instructions are to use a special easy-spray laminate floor cleaner and to dampen the mop, so I’m off the store again in a bit to look for such stuff.
I love this new floor. No scrubbing spots out of carpeting for me anymore!
We lucked into a friend of a friend who had a whole pile of bamboo flooring sitting around, and when we said we’d take it off his hands, he just gave it to us. We did the installation ourselves (it’s not bad, but if we ever do that again, it will be much better). Our bedrooms, kitchen and hallways are actually linoleum, and I would definitely have lino again. I’m finding the wood too finicky for my taste - I’m afraid my cats’ claws will scratch it, I’m afraid of everything else scratching it. I saw a comparison of hardwoods and laminate, and the laminate is as tough as nails. Looking at it in the stores and seeing floors done with it, I really like the look of it, too. I think if you install it properly (and of course not everyone does), you get a very nice, extremely durable end product.
We have carpet over the cement/concrete floor in the basement. I like the warmth, but we’ve had water in the basement twice. So unless your basement is dry and likely to stay that way, you might consider tile and area rugs instead of carpet or wood.
One thing to be careful about using some of the newer, sustainable wood flooring is dimensional stability. Oak and Maple do not expand and contract much with changes in temp, but Bamboo and Lyptus will. I have an older house that sees some pretty good fluctuations in temp and humidity, and having a more dimensionally stable product was a necessity.
Well, I wanted something as easy as possible to take care of. If someone would get around to inventing that fountain of youth and turn me back into a 25-year-old, maybe I’d consider something higher maintenance, like wood or carpeting.
I also took into account the domestic friction factor. If I got something that needed lots of polishing to look good, like wood, my husband would never be happy unless it was buffed up twice a week. Bollocks to that. I never even considered wood.
And although I didn’t confirm it, I just assumed that laminate was cheaper than wood. The workers don’t have to be super-skilled to install it and there’s next to no waste, as laminate doesn’t split or arrive warped or defective like natural wood. So unless someone knows otherwise, count on a lower price.
By the way, I found the laminate cleaner and tried it out on some sweaty palm-prints left behind by the workers. Nothing to it. Spray, wipe over it with the swiffer thingy, all done with no squatting or fuss. More data: I accidentally dropped some scissors onto it awhile ago. They landed point-down, but I can’t see that they did jack to the surface.
I have oak floors. They were put down in summer. A few months later on a freezing November day, I burned something on the stove and opened all the windows to air out the house. You should have heard the sound those boards made :eek: - cracking sounds like gunshots! The poor cat leapt up in the hair three feet and disappeared for hours.
