Flooring

[DancingGoose]

Hi all

I need some advice on flooring options on a house I've just purchased.

I would like to replace the floor in the living room. The room is 6 x 3.5m with one window at one end. Currently there is walnut 12mm laminate down and it is just too dark for the room. I've been looking at options for a lighter colour laminate (but not too yellow-y) and I'm really struggling to find any which will look nice within my budget but perhaps this is because I am not good at visualising how it's going to look. I'm worried about getting a laminate which will look naff and also concerned it will mean the room is on the noisier/colder side.

So I have also been considering having carpet, but I have 2 cats which are buggers for trying to sharpen their claws on carpets, so I feel reluctant to fork out for a lovely carpet which will then be destroyed by them.

Does anyone have any experience of either a lighter shade laminate which looks great or carpets which cats can't destroy?!

Thanks!

[TremoloGreen]

I just bought some for DD1s bedroom as it is in a newer extension so no floorboards. Krono supernatural. The cheapest place to buy it at the moment is carpetright if you can pick it up yourself. Fit fine in my ford focus. I laid it myself so cannot comment on their fitting service. It looks amazing for the price, around £10 per sqm. It's a good quality product too so easy to fit, there weren't any broken tongues etc that you sometimes get with a cheaper product. The colour I bought was boulder oak which is quite greyish but they also had a nice pale yellow oak colour, might be called colorado oak?

[TremoloGreen]

Ps it is not noisy at all, I got a 5mm foam underlay for it that was not too expensive. If laying on a concrete subfloor get one with an inbuilt vapour barrier.

[TremoloGreen]

A pic as the carpetright website is not v true to life

[SnuffleGruntSnorter]

I thought discussing laminate flooring was forbidden?

Seriously though, I really like Tremlo's suggestion, we have very similar in our kitchen

[DancingGoose]

Thanks. That colour in the picture is lovely. I will pop along and have a look. Good advice about the underlay too - the floor is concrete.

[MidnightDexy]

i had an entire flat covered in balterio sapphire olive - it's hard to describe but was a little like a greyish brown, but still quite pale. I ended up choosing it because, like you, i found so many of the paler shades yellow-ish, but i didn't want something extremely pale. The olive colour is very versatile. One bathroom had grey tiles and one had brown, and i had various shades of soft furnishing around the flat and this colour worked with it all.

It looks quite similar to Tremolo's actually!

www.luxuryflooringandfurnishings.co.uk/balterio-tradition-sapphire-olive-laminate-flooring-539.html

Get the thickest laminate you can afford, and the best, thickest underlay you can afford. 4 edge (i.e. grooves all around each plank) look lovely, imo.

I loved my laminate, a quick hoover and a microfibre mop and the whole flat could be done in 10 minutes. Very hygenic, and not noisy at all. It was also extremely hard wearing - the only nicks it got in two years were where i dropped a very heavy and sharp item on it from a great height (and to be fair, no hard flooring will withstand that).

Finally - shop around, a lot. The prices vary wildly in the online retailers.

[DancingGoose]

Thanks, that's a lovely colour too.

How thick should laminate be for a living area? Someone told me a minimum of 12mm - is this correct?

[MidnightDexy]

The thicker the better but i'm not sure 12mm is strictly necessary - just checked my link and saw mine was 9mm. I can't remember all the details of the research i did at the time now but i'm so anal i wouldn't have bought 9mm unless i'd been reassured it was sufficient!

it gets more expensive as you go up the spec (obviously) but mind you don't end up spending so much you could have just gotten wood...

x

[PigletJohn]

12mm is more typical of engineered or wooden flooring. I don't think I've ever seen a laminate that thick.