One Room Challenge {Week 4}: 4 Things to Consider When Choosing Flooring

If choosing the right flooring feels overwhelming or stressful, I want to share 4 helpful tips to consider when making your final choice!

For those of you who faithfully follow along on my One Room Challenge escapades, I’m sorry I’m a few days late! I’ve only asked myself a million times ten times, why on earth I jumped on board this time around! It’ll be three months next week that we’ve been out of our home for some reconstruction and trying to juggle contractors, appointments, and now pulling together this ORC reveal has almost done me in!

Hopefully though, by the end of next week I’ll be standing at the bottom of our stairs looking up to a gorgeous staircase makeover!

Four weeks ago, I shared our Board and Batten Style Stairway inspiration board and let me tell ya, it is seriously crunchtime!

I think the biggest decision we’ve had to make through this whole reconstruction was what kind of flooring to choose. Our home is a 2storey and we used to have tile and hardwood on the mainfloor and carpet upstairs, downstairs and on both staircases.

I don’t consider myself a flooring expert at all, but after visiting quite a number of flooring places and talking extensively with different salespeople about all the different options, I feel like we sure learned a lot. I even joked that I might come back for a job after this is all said and done!

For me, choosing the right flooring for our home felt overwhelming. You walk into a flooring place and you’re greeted with carpet, hardwood, engineered hardwood, linoleum, vinyl flooring, cork, tile and the list goes on. To take some of the stress out of choosing the perfect flooring for your home, I’m going to share a little about what we learned and how we chose the flooring that best suits us and our home!

Carpet

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Oh, carpet. It’s no wonder it’s so popular. It instantly brings so much warmth and coziness to a room! Growing up in my childhood home on the farm, we didn’t have any carpet. Zero. So whenever we went to visit relatives who had carpet I was in love. I always dreamt that if I have a home one day, I’ll have that fuzzy, cozy stuff in every single room. Fast forward a few years and being a home owner for quite a while and I’ve learned a few things. And changed my mind, too.

I know that I still love carpet but I also know how much dust and other little garbage it harbours. I’ll totally admit I neglect dusting and don’t vacuum as often as I should, however, switching out our flooring now has totally steered me in the direction to go carpet-less in the upstairs of our home. We did decide to put carpet downstairs because in our climate basements tend to be cooler and I love the coziness that carpet adds downstairs.

 Hardwood

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We had hardwood floor in our home and we really liked it. When we bought our house, it was a light oak color but then a few years back my husband and I had this awesome idea of refinishing our floors to a darker stain. Yes, it was a crazy, huge project, but we loved how it turned out! The one thing about hardwood though is that it gets marked up. Quite easily sometimes too, depending on the hardness of the wood. I would constantly remind myself that those marks are just the characteristics of hardwood but I’ll admit… I would cringe when a big scratch or gauge was made on our floors. The great thing about hardwood though is that it can be sanded down and refinished. Keep in mind though, it’s a very big project and likely not something you’ll do too often.

Cost- I think cost is one of the first factors to consider when purchasing anything! I remember car shopping once and my husband and I test drove an SUV that was double what our budget was. Talk about setting yourself up for some disappointment! Ha! There’s really no use looking at flooring that’s $10/square foot if your budget is $5/square foot. Make sure you talk to your sales agent about installation costs and subfloors. Since we switched from carpet to vinyl planking, we will need subfloors and that will definitely make your costs go up.

Durability- Another very, very important factor to consider. Having children, pets, gravel/sand in your yard, a pool, etc. will all play a role in what flooring will stand the wear and tear of everyday living. Keep in mind that little stones and gravel underneath shoes can easily scratch hardwood floor. Having carpet on stairs can show wear over time but adds traction for running up and down stairs quickly. Flooring is not something we replace every 5 years so having something that’ll stand the test of time, is very important!

Cleaning- We can’t forget about cleaning when it comes to making your flooring choice. I’ve had flooring that showed streaks whenever I’d wipe or mop something up quickly. Something else I can’t stand is in the summertime when we go barefoot in the house and you see sweat marks wherever you look. Keep in mind, depending on the color of grout in tile lines, they can require a lot of extra scrubbing to keep them clean looking.

Installation- When we were shopping for flooring and discussing prices, I sometimes forgot about installation prices! Having your flooring installed with increase your costs quite a bit. If you are a DIYer perhaps installing tile or laminate flooring on your own is an option. For ourselves, we were told numerous times, that one of the most important things about vinyl flooring is the installation of it and that it’s important to let an experienced installer do it. Home Depot offers some fabulous workshops so be sure to check them out!

If you’re shopping for new flooring for your home, I hope this helps!! There’s so many different things to consider and I hope this takes some of the guesswork out of making this big purchase. Don’t be afraid to ask lots and lots of questions. It’s a big investment on your part and you’re entitled to as much information on the flooring your interested in. We had salespeople show us how scratch-resistant some flooring is by allowing us to use very sharp objects to try and scratch and also saw demonstrations of water spills on flooring. Let me know if you’ve purchased new flooring lately and any other pointers I could add to this!!

Thanks as always, for stopping by today!

Thanks so much to my amazing sponsors HomeRight and The Summery Umbrella for amazing products that truly help make this ORC a success!!