Carpet vs wood flooring in lounge?

[JellycatElfie]

Hi all. At present we have carpet in the living room but with a 4 year old and a new baby it’s always getting spillages and worse. It also hasn’t worn well with heavy toys leaving dents etc. I’m thinking of having oak flooring, but mil says I will regret it because it’s so cold. We live in a 50s house which is colder than our previous new build, but I thought I could get around it by having a big rug covering the middle of the floor. If you’ve gone from carpet to wood flooring do you regret it? Money’s tight so I don’t want to make the wrong decision!

I have carpet in mine and three kids! I do prefer carpet. My parents have a wooden floor with a large rug and my mum says it's cold. When they redecorate they will be having carpet put back down.

Carpet all the way in the living room, you can buy carpet that can be bleached and very easy to mop up messes.

Thanks! Do you have dark coloured carpet? How’s it wearing with three kids?

vax carpet shampooer cleaner ten minutes with stardrops in the tank like hoovering cleans the carpets lovely do it before going out somewhere carpets dry before you get home £99 from argos

I went from carpet to LVT wood effect (cheaper than wood and arguably easier to maintain).

I don’t regret it at all but my lounge is a through lounge and everyone had to walk through it to the kitchen. So it took a beating with a carpet and was a nightmare to keep it looking good (it was beige).

Since my renovations I have open plan living room diner into the kitchen so it is one floor all the way through and am thoroughly delighted with it, even after a year (almost to the day)

But
If it was a self contained room I would probably have carpet.

The only place we have carpet is the stairs. I love the fact wood can be cleaned properly so easily. Yes a big rug in front room but that’s it.
I’d never fully carpet a room anymore, plus if you want to revamp a room it’s very cheap and easy with a new rug

I find our hard floors much harder to maintain than our carpet, it just needs to be good quality carpet. It doesn't even require a carpet cleaner to cleanup difficult messes.

We have wood flooring throughout from when we bought the house. Yes it’s quick and easy to mop up minor spills but if it gets very wet or wet for a long time (eg. water was leaking out of our Christmas tree stand) it totally wrecks the wood, the varnish on ours also clearly isn’t strong enough for high traffic areas and the hallway looks permanently grubby and can probably only be fixed by getting it sanded and varnished again, which is a massive job, a million times worse than getting carpet shampooed. Finally, yes, it’s cold! I plan to wait until the children are past school age then start working on my husband to get carpets.

We have restored our floorboards in living room. They look beautiful, and despite having a fairly chilly house it's not cold. Soft furnishings and curtains can help with that if you're worried. I can't stand carpets downstairs tbh, they just suck in the dirt (but I'm clumsy as hell so will always spill / drop things and my carpets are always stained and awful!)

Our carpet was awful after a while so we had wood flooring put in. That was great during the spilling and weeing phases. Now that the DC are late teens we're going to go back to carpet as it's cosier.

If you go for the wood floor and rug combo, be sure to get a washable rug, or it'll just suffer the same problems as your current carpet.

Having said that, you can buy carpet that washes easily. Wool/natural fibres are more robust but are harder to keep clean. I think polypropylene/man-made fibres shrug off stains more easily, so might be an acceptable compromise.

Wood floors do tend to be harder on dropped cups and falling children, so there is that to consider too.

FWIW my cat was sick this morning, and the relief was when I realised it was on the wood floor 😼

We moved to a 1960 fixer upper and stripped the carpet back to the parquet underneath. It looked lovely but always felt cold, and we put carpet in as soon as we could afford to.

We have a good quality 80/20 wool carpet, and Rug doctor it when it gets grubby and it scrubs up brilliantly. We've had much cheaper carpet in the past and it got totally trashed. If even toys are leaving dents in your carpets, I wonder if it's just not a good quality carpet.

I have wood.much easier to clean. My front door leads to the living room which is the one we use to get logs/coal to the inglenook. So easy to sweep and mop.

We have solid maple all through downstairs but have a massive deep pile rug in the living room. Before we got the rug it did feel a bit cold and clinical but love it with the rug, which also kills a lot of the noise

We have wood throughout the downstairs - so easy to clean, and v hardwearing (it's been down 9 years, and only a couple of minor scratches). We have a huge rug in the living area to make it cosy.

I find wood a nightmare to clean. It shows water spots, we've marks on it. Everything takes twice as long as you have to sweep, Hoover then mop. It's awful and I'm desperate to change it to a more practical flooring!!!

Method wood floor cleaners are amazing - no marks, and they make the house smell lovely.

I have wood flooring or ceramic tiles everywhere, softened up with rugs. I have no carpets in the house whatsoever, even in bedrooms, as I think it's impossible to keep them clean.

We had lovely wooden flooring but as dd started crawling and walking we decided carpet would be safer ( she kept bumping her head when she fell over ) much prefer carpet xx

We put hard floor down and regretted it because a crawling baby makes scratches and dents. DS tends to play in the bedroom now because it’s carpeted and therefore warmer and impossible to scratch. With an older child I’d definitely have a hard floor and a foam playmat though. Spillages aren’t an issue if you eat and drink at the dining table. If you let kids have food and drinks anywhere then the floor will get ruined no matter what finish you choose.

Carpet in living areas with kids is just not hygienic. Honestly, children across most of the world are learning to crawl etc without carpet so i never understand that argument. My own childhood home had stone floors - no lasting damage! We have wooden flooring with a good quality underlay underneath and it's not cold. If you're thinking of exposing subfloor floorboards that could be... they weren't really designed to be exposed in most cases.

I’d really like wood but I settled on “bleach cleanable” carpet. It’s light coloured and everything comes off of it! I’ve spilt so much on it but you’d never guess. It wasn’t expensive...100% man made fibres lol!

I got a carpet cleaner convinced carpets would be unhygienic, but the dirtiest thing I clean turns out to be the sofa.

@TremoloGreen how is carpet any less hygienic than hard floors? Both can be cleaned! As I say our carpets are much easier to clean than our hard floors.

We're about to move into our new house. Weve never had carpets in a house. The new flooring will be cork covered with vinyl. It's hard-wearing, can also be useful bathrooms and the kitchen, warmer than laminate, easy to clean and quieter than hardwood flooring.