Please help me with this hall flooring

[buckeejit]

We need to replace the old carpet in hall, stairs & landing & living room. As the house is split level it’s a bit odd.

I love parquet style & prefer proper wood but it’s so expensive. I’m currenting thinking of having real wood in hall & living room in middle floor & similar but in laminate upstairs & downstairs, with either carpet or runner on the stairs.

Looking at cost this would still be about £3.5k & that’s without fitting. Bro is a joiner so hopefully wouldn’t be too expensive for fitting. Local flooring shop is £49+vat for engineered boards & £25+vat for laminate.

Dh wants to order it cheaper online but I’m worried & a little dubious of the unknown for such a big purchase. Has anyone ordered from anywhere online for significantly cheaper & any recommendations?

Also any yay or nays for my proposal? Any advice appreciated. Thank you!

Hopeful bump....

Slightly less hopeful bump!

Could you do a reclaimed wood floor? We got a cracking oak floor from a reclamation yard for a song compared to new. Ours let us take more than we needed and purchased the excess back off us at full price, so we could match the colour and wear.

£49+Vat for engineered wood that is fitted? Or just supplied?
You can def buy good quality stuff for less than that, I've seen a good deal at the £30-35 inc Vat price mark. I'd shop around.

Also bear in mind going from carpet to hard floor on stairs is going to be a lot noisier

I second the reclaimed wood idea

Hadn't thought of reclaimed wood - will look into that thanks. Is it reclaimed long boards or reclaimed parquet you mean?

Thinking we will carpet the stairs as it should be the easiest & cheapest option.

Thanks - good to know that it can be a good bit cheaper. Will do a bit of shopping around & get some samples online

What's underneath your current carpet? Are there floorboards you could expose?

We bought reclaimed parquet from ebay, it needed a lot of treating to get the bitumen off the bottom, but the guy who fitted it for us did all that as well, he was amazing. The floor looked fantastic, and was a really bargainous way of doing it.

@EmmaStone do you mind me asking roughly how much that cost? I'm interested in parquet but am terrified by the costs !

No, it's just concrete under. There'll be boards upstairs but it's only small.

Has anyone any recs of n
nationwide or online flooring shops to try? We're in Northern Ireland so shipping always expensive 🙄

@TiddleTaddleTat I'm sorry, I can't remember, but we bought the parquet locally from Ebay, that was VERY reasonable, and the guy who did the work for us was a one-man band from a flooring shop, and I seem to recall being very reasonable - I've got £1k in my head for about a week's work (actually, that may have just been the laying, sanding, sealing, he would have spent quite a lot of time preparing the blocks...). Overall it was cheaper than buying new wood though.