Carpet or Wood flooring upstairs

[LondonGirl83]

We are laying down flooring in our newly renovated house and have a decision to make!

We were initially planning to do a runner up the main flight of stairs and then lay carpet on the first and 2nd floor stairs and landings. However, we have cats and since we moved in a few weeks ago, they have already damaged the carpet in the main bedroom where weve had them locked up while work is ongoing.

Its making me want to install engineered flooring on the landings and just do runners up both set of stairs. I wonder though if the noise will be unbearable.

My husband and I are trying to weigh the pros and cons of the cleanliness of wood flooring vs. the noisiness of wood floors. What would you do?

We also have cats and we decided to go for wooden floors all throughout the house (landing, bedrooms, etc), apart from a main flatwoven runner on the staircases (we chose flatwoven rather than a loopy one, as we thought it might last longer, unfortunately this gets slowly but surely destroyed by our cats, they can't just help themselves sharpening their claws each time they go up and down the stairs). I can't really comment on the level of noise as we didn't live in the house before renovation, but ours is a semi-detached house, so hopefully not too noisy for our only lovely neighbour, as we tried to mitigate the noise by putting down fluffy rugs around the beds, large paintings on the walls, etc. to absorb any noise.
Our previous house had carpets on the stairs, landings, in all bedrooms, and while they were nice and cosy when new, I felt in our next house we should have clean, wooden floors - easier to maintain, neat appearance, you don't have the split between wood and carpet, or if something spills, you quickly clean it up, etc.

It definitely helps with two cats and two small children :-)

I think it depends on the family and the house.

We have very much stuck to the carpets upstairs, after a brief trial of floorboards, because without them the noise is horrendous. Granted,
DH sounds like a herd of elephants in mountaineering boots when he walks upstairs, but I think that anyone would be pretty noisy on a wooden floor. Plus we have a bit of an issue with drafts.

We're picking carpet that doesn't get damaged by clawing next time as well! I.e. not loop carpets.

Carpet, cats have only destroyed the carpets because they have been shut in. Hard flooring in bedrooms is very noisy.