No. More. Carpet. But what instead for stairs / upstairs hallway?

[Sadik]

I am so over carpet - didn't have carpet in the two houses previous to this one, and it was SO much cleaner and nicer without. (Not helped by pets / allergies etc.).

I've been here 8 years with increasingly tatty wall-to-wall carpet and I am finally at the stage where I can get rid. Downstairs is easy - going for wooden floors in sitting/dining rooms, kitchen already has tiles and hallway old parquet which can be revived.

But stairs / upstairs I'm not sure what to do. Previous houses weren't really comparable (house 1 had big ceramic tiles everywhere - not sure that will cut it in the UK , house 2 didn't have a proper upstairs). Thinking of maybe cork tiles in bathroom / vinyl in toilet. Would engineered wood floors + rugs be a strange choice for upstairs hall/bedrooms? Maybe strip back the stairs then compromise on a sisal runner to deal with noise?

Would love to hear other people's choices - especially if you have muddy children, fluffy pets and cats that scratch things up . . .

If you really don't want carpet upstairs I would go for engineered wood on stairs and bedrooms and then good quality waterproof laminate / LVT in the bathroom.

I live in Sweden where no one has wall to wall carpets and we just have wood/parquet/laminate/linoleum in bedrooms, and rugs.

Definitely want rid of the carpet Hipster - was just looking at the (very tatty need replacing) cork tiles in the bathroom and wondering if it would be strange to continue cork tiles throughout the bathroom/hallway/upstairs loo.

I have varnished wood with a striped carpet down the middle. Uncovered stairs are crazy noisy and when DS started moving around they would have been a death trap.

Easy enough to clean, no awkward corners.

We liv in Belgium where wall to wall carpet is very rare. We have tiled floors throughout downstairs, and wooden floors in all the bedrooms and upstairs hallway. The bathroom/toilet floors are tiled and our stairs currently have tatty carpet on them, which will be going as soon as we have the money to decorate the hall, stairs and landing!

What are you going to put on your stairs, amyboo?

Interested in the stairs question too. I'm starting to think I'd like hard flooring upstairs but I do worry it'd be noisy, and the stairs vex me - our Re not nice hardwood or anything underneath the carpet, so what then? I like sisal a lot, but our cats would treat it as a giant scratching post, so can't do that.

I think we'll need to do something wood, as we have dark wood floors upstairs, and the current set up with the carpet is odd (not to mention dirty, as I have 3 young kids). The outside of the stairs and the bannisters, handrail etc, is all done in beautiful beech, so we're hoping there might be the same under the carpet.... If not, I guess we might lay some, so that it all looks the same, and then possibly put a carpet runner up the middle.

Oh, and just to add, we don't have the noise issue with wooden floors upstairs, as, like many houses in Belgium, our first floor is reinforced concrete.

I can't decide how much the noise would be an issue - it's just me and (anti-social) teenage dd. I guess I could strip & paint them, then add a runner later if I found the noise a problem.

I have a suspicion that if I have engineered wood upstairs in the bedrooms it will actually improve noise in some ways as our current floorboards are very creaky/bouncy and laid under the wall between my/dd's room, so if one of us gets up, the other one's floor bounces. (Planning nice big fluffy rugs in any case)

I've got a similar problem. Have gradually got rid of all carpets in our house and replaced with laminate. Tried varnishing the stairs with floor varnish but it wears really quickly. Am considering havjng carpet runners on the stairs but it seems a bit odd when there's no other carpet in the house.

Hi i'm thinking the same about the stairs..i'm looking at stair cladding or a stair runner but with a runner you need to have good looking stairs