Carpet or hard flooring?

[Bobbybobbins]

Sorry for the world's most boring thread!

We have a manky carpet in our living room which is hard to clean.

We are considering whether to replace with a carpet, soft to sit on, or hard flooring, easier to clean. We have two preschool children.

Any recommendations/experiences?

While the kids are young I only ever get hard flooring downstairs. We don't have a dining room and a tiny kitchen though so all food and drink is had in the living room. Every single day I am grateful we have laminate everywhere haha

The downsides are there's always little bits on the floor, it's colder and obviously harder. It doesn't feel as cosy but it's 100% worth it while they're small.

I've got a nice rug that they/we can sit on to play games etc

In Australia now, but when in the UK had wood floors and rugs downstairs, linoleum in the kitchen.

Now in Oz, still hardwood floors on the ground floor, except for the bathroom.

We have hardwood floors throughout the ground floor.

I'm desperate to go back to carpet, it's just so much more comfortable... (but we have a dog with very smelly feet)

Three pre-schoolers here and we’ve gone for carpet. Much warmer and cosier than hard flooring and nice and soft for crawling babies and falling toddlers.

We just put cork down in our kitchen diner. Easy to clean but feels a bit softer underfoot than wood. Its speckled so you don't see every bit of dirt, incidentally it hides Weetabix very well

I would have hard flooring and rugs with little ones.

You can fit thermal insulation boarding underneath a hard floor, to make it warmer, or even install underfloor heating. I’ve got both in my kitchen, with tiles on top - it’s very cosy, and easy to keep clean when the cat has had a busy (murdering and disembowelling) session overnight with all the mice she rounds up in the garden!
If you choose carpet, avoid wool ones. Once the insecticide wears off, in a couple of years, you will be infested with carpet moths which eat large holes in it. My siting room carpet is a disaster area of moth damage- I’m going to have to replace the lot.

Hard floor (wood ideally not tile or stone) and washable rugs. Large cotton rugs can be pretty cheap.

Hard flooring all the way, with a few rugs scattered around.

Hard flooring and slippers for comfort. I recommend engineered oAk :)

wooden floors all the way for me, so much more beautiful, and warmer than tiles, I hate carpet, we have dust allergies and it is never clean enough, I am taking it out in the bedrooms, too, now!