Help me 'floor' my house!

[starrystarrynights]

Please can you help? I'm at my wits end trying to work out whether to carpet/floor /laminate the new property we are buying.

The property is a conversion, we are buying the upstairs.Its difficult to explain but the property has a large communal hallway. What this means is that it has NO downstairs hall belonging to the house we are buying. So your first step when walking through 'our' door would be onto the first step on the stairs, I realise now there's not even room for a basket for shoes :(. I'd love a neutral carpet but with DD and au-pair the carpet will be manky I'm sure, even if their shoes are put on in the communal hallway.
So my questions are:

• do you think a stripy carpet would work? If so, should it be stripy just for the stairs and not the landings (there are 2 small landings, 3 further stairs to the living room, and a further flight of stairs to DD and au-pair's room)
• do you think that painting the first set of stairs might work instead? these would be easy to keep clean but I'm not sure how noisy they would be for the neighbours downstairs, even with shoes removed.
• we can't afford wooden flooring in the living room at the moment, what colour carpet should I have here and in the rest of the house that is childproof but neutral? Sofas are brown leather and curtains are taupeish, if this helps.

Many thanks in advance, I'm asking lots of vague questions but not having somewhere to put shoes has given me a real dilemma

You can get those stair basket things that are shaped to sit on a step. But might be awkward if you are carrying a buggy up and down every day.

IKEA has a couple of different wall mounted shoe cupboard thingies.

Might be worth bearing in mind that loop carpet is more hardwearing but can't be steam-cleaned as effectively as normal pile.

Loop pile polpropylene is not a great practical choice - it doesn't have the resistence of wool - so it looses it's shape pretty quickly - also have a lokk at a piece of carpet and bend it like it would be bent on stairs - the look isn't great - also I think it's slippier so not as safe to use on stairs. Better to choose normal style pile, it's softer - choose one with quite a few strand per square inch so the strands don't separate too much on the stairs - John Lewis is very good for giving advice on this and surprisingly cheaper than Carpet rite.

Polypropylene is a fantastic product and cleans up amazingly well.

Thanks everyone for your replies - v helpful (grin).

I'm struggling to find wall mounted shoe cabinets at Ikea, the ones I've seen on-line are partly floor mounted - could you point me in the right direction?

I think John Lewis is a fab idea - I'll head there at the Xmas sales :)

Any ideas about colours, if I don't go for the stripy option? I'd like something neutralish that will go with the brown leather sofas etc.

Many thanks!

Last time I looked in John Lewis they had a stripey brown and black polypropylene carpet very high quality and quite expensive - I thought it was gorgeous and not at all tiring on the eye. Polypropylene is easy to clean but apparently it's not so good at repelling dirt so can look dirtier quicker - so don't make the carpet too light otherwise you'll be cleaning non stop.

You might want to find a nice carpet and then check out online companies - but a word of warning, fitters need to be pretty good to finish stairs off properly...so I would be inclined to save up and make the investment something that will give you long term pleasure and practicality.

And put a big Turtle mat at the bottom of the stairs. They really are good at absorbing muck off shoes.