Can't decide on carpet or wood flooring.

[Greenshadow]

We need to replace the existing (70s!) carpet in our living room.

It's quite a large l-shaped living/dining room and is also a through-way to another room so gets a lot of wear one way or another.

The sensible solution, what with children, cats, food etc would be a wood (engineer probably, laminate possibly) with rugs but somehow I just can't bring myself to abandon lovely, comfortable, warm carpets.

Please talk to me about your experiences of wood floors - are they cold? Do you regret installing it?

Laminate can be cool and noisy. Proper wood is lovely -we don't have any carpets in the house at all. You can still have large chunky rugs.

They are easy to clean and as we have a dog, there is no smelly carpet when it comes in wet.

wood floors are great, plus a rug

We do have a small area of laminate in the hall - and yes, it is a bit noisy.
It's the children who are absolutely dead set against wood floors, even thought we have said they would have rugs where you put your feet when you sit on the sofa.

I love wooden floors - much prefer them to horrible dirty fitted carpets! If you have a rug on your wooden floor you get the warmth in winter and in summer you can send it to the cleaners!

We have wood in the conservatory and kitchen. Love it, so easy to clean, and is lovely and warm.

Would have wood in the sitting room, but house is very old and floor is very, very uneven, so have to stick with carpet.

You can buy some lovely rugs that are thicker than carpet. Have great ones in John Lewis and just bought my DD a big one for her bedroom(to cover make up stains!] from Ikea. Go shopping and have a good feel!

I found laminate was always covered in dust - even an hour after you had swept the damn thing! Don't know if real wood floors are the same though. Personally I love carpets - they are so cosy and in this country they are needed. I think wooden floors can be quite cold unless you have a rug in the roon which seems to defeat the object.....

i hate wood floors with an absolute passion! it just seems so unhomely and cold.

we lived in house with it in the front room and it was just horrible. endless dust bunnies blowing about, slippery when you have socks on, echo-ey when you walk on it with shoes, cold when you have bare feet and hard for children to play on.

as nikki points out, whats the point if you are going to cover it in rugs. decent rugs weigh a ton so it's not easy to just bung them to the dry cleaners

get some lovely carpets put down and invest in a decent carpet shampooer.

We had laminate floors fitted in our first house and I hated it with a passion. It was cold, noisy and dusty. When we moved house we put down really thick lovely carpet in every room and I loved it after living with the laminate BUT having 2 small children, a cat combined with the fact we had chosen beige carpets meant they were very quickly ruined.

Dh wanted to lay wood flooring throughout the house and I was dead against it after the laminate experience however we did it and I have to say I love it. Proper wood flooring is NOTHING like laminate and I would urge you to reconsider the laminate. Yes real wood flooring is more expensive but it is totally totally worth it IMO. If you can't afford solid wood flooring stick with carpets.

depends how much you feel the cold. DP and I both feel it a lot and we have wooden floors (can't afford to carpet them) and it's freezing. In fact, the houses of everyone I know who has wooden floors are cold. But they all love it. I have to say I think there's a lot of snobbery about wooden floors, but in a country that's hardly subtropical it does seem to be a case of form over function.

So, in short, if you feel the cold carpet, if you don't don't.

ditto curtains and blinds, while we're at it! Blinds NEVER keep out the draughts.

how old are your kids?

if under about 4 - a solid floor every time.

my carpet is carpet tile - which is great as it comes up to wash - with a normal carpet there would be stains all over it. even with tile sometimes they don't wash back to a fresh-smelling condition.

Fitting a solid floor can be trickier, as it involves cuttig the bits etc - though with a mitre saw it can be easier. even easier if you pay someone else to do it :)

carpet is fairly straightforwards to self-fit.

if you have a dog carpet is better for them, as dogs tend to 'skate' on a slippy surface. dogs are usually less stain generating too...
though if you have a hairy breed its easier to get hair off a solid floor.....

points to consider?

I have Kahrs wooden floor, very expensive and has proved to be a nightmare, scratches a lot, have to mop any spilled water straight away or I am left with a mark and when I mop the floor with a well wrung mop I still have to dry straight away with a cloth to prevent marks. Maybe I am just unlucky with this floor, it does look beautiful but it is definitely not easy maintenance.

Thanks for all the advise.

OK, convinced not to get laminate.

Think we need to find a showroom with a decent sized example of some engineered wood floor - always so hard to get an impression of what it will be like from a tiny sample.

Cat64 - Had forgotten about the slippery side of wood floors though. Something else to think about.

Have you thought of sisal?

We have this, and it's great.

We have natural oak flooring downstairs and up.

Love it downstairs - it is so easy to clean and great for heavy traffic, mess of young children etc.

Hate it upstairs. It looks lovely, granted, but it's chilly, noisy and we are going to carpet it in the new year.

Having rugs on our floor wouldn't defeat the object in our case Nikki and Bamboo, as we wouldn't have them at the end where the dining table is and probably not where people use it as a corridor - just where we sit.

Love the IDEA of wood, but still being drawn back to carpets...

Would never get carpet, particularly with small children. My parents have wood, we have top end laminate and there is no difference in the level of dust, or the look of it. My mother is killed trying to keep on top of the dust. But I'd still rather chase dust bunnies than clean carpet.

Get wood floors and rugs - best of both worlds. Rugs can be taken outside and cleaned when you need to.

Sisal is hardwearing and looks great. And hides the dirt.

Not as comfy as normal carpet, but easy to clean and cosier than wood.

Brought to you by the sisal marketing board

I have sisal up my stirs. Its great until the cleaner drops her bucket of water on it

Greeny we got some cracking solid oak flooring from Wickes recently and it was 33% orf

We've just finished laying engineered wood floor in our living/dining room having always had carpet previously and we all (including the teenagers) really like it in spite of all of us having similar reservations to your own at the start. We decided we didn't want carpets again as we have a moth problem. The new wood doesn't seem cold (although the fact we had bare concrete for 3 months in the interim might have influenced our opinions there), and I've not noticed a problem with dust or noise. It has a slightly textured (brushed?) finish, so not too slippery and the planks lock together very tightly so no gaps. We have just one fairly big turkish rug in front of the hearth. The only drawback is that there is a slight 'bounce' in one part of the room where evidently the concrete wasn't quite as level as we thought!