hardwood in the main family room
 

I really want to replace the carpet in our family room. It's our main living space. We've been in the house 6 years, and I don't know when it was put in before we moved in. It's a beige color, and of course gets so dirty. We get it cleaned but stiil.... I like the idea of hardwood, but dh feels like it will be cold (we do live in a cold climate). We'd need a big area rug. We'd also put it down the hallway (ranch house), that leads to the three bedrooms. The three bedrooms do have hardwood floors that we would not be replacing. I'm thinking it will look funny to not have the same wood, right?

Dh isn't a big fan of the berber carpet that we have in the basement, but I think it's also good for high traffic areas. If we don't do hardwood, what else would be good?

Re: hardwood in the main family room
 

Hardwood is pretty and cold. Also not helpful with absorbing noise. I like carpet with children who sit in the floor to play.

Re: hardwood in the main family room
 

I grew up with hardwood floors in the living room, we had pillows that we kept to sit in the floor. I love the hard wood floors.


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Re: hardwood in the main family room
 

Following- same question at our house

Re: hardwood in the main family room
 

The downstairs is all that fake hardwood. I forget what it's called. The home came with it like that.

The stairs and upstairs is the original hardwood (we pulled up the carpet and refinished).
So the transition from down to up is a different colored wood and I think looks good.



We have a big area rug in the front room.
I love easy to clean floors with area rugs especially as we had a dog and cat.


I admit, once we changed from carpet to hardwood - it did become noticeably noisier with the running upstairs. As my kids grow get older, the noise level is reducing anyway.



I don't notice it cold on the floors at all - HOWEVER we have boiler heat so all the heating is run through the floors so that might be why.

Re: hardwood in the main family room
 

All of our floors are hardwood or tile. I love the wood, hate the tile. (I've got kids with allergies, so it's preferable to carpet.) The wood is easy to care for; I just sweep or dust mop.

Our living room is over the garage, but it's extremely well insulated; the floor doesn't feel cold to me. (The kitchen tile does, though.) I have an area rug in the living room for color and to protect the finish from the furniture. (Oy, the scraping! :shiver My kids can't leave the furniture alone!) Our last place was an old house and when we took up the ugly carpets that were there, I did notice drafts - mainly around the radiators and from under the molding. Apparently there were gaps that weren't initially visible. If we had stayed longer, I'd have wanted to re-insulate because it was an expensive place to heat. Our current place is new construction, though and extremely snug.

Re: hardwood in the main family room
 

We're in an old house and the crawlspace isn't insulated. I don't generally like barefeet. But the kids always have barefeet and sit on the floor, despite the cold hardwood. :shrug (We don't have a rug.) I think it's possible to do different hardwoods, just depends on which and how you transition.

Re: hardwood in the main family room
 

I would go with the hardwood with large comfy area rugs that can be cleaned and changed out if needed.

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We have hardwood on our main floor. I don't think it's cold. I do think it is noisy when the children are running around.

Re: hardwood in the main family room
 

We have hardwood. It was loud in our house until we replaced small area rugs with bigger ones, put more pictures on the walls, and added curtains. The floors and leather furniture can feel cold if we are heating the house with the furnace, but when our wood stove is used the heat is nicely absorbed into the furniture and floors. I guess we are the opposite in that most of our bedrooms have wall to wall carpeting. We did that to help deaden noise in those rooms.

Re: hardwood in the main family room
 

We had hardwood in every room of our last house. I loved it so much. Area rug in the living room, no one complained about having to sit and play. So much easier to clean. We moved a year and a half ago and now we have laminate in the main level and carpet upstairs. I hate the carpet so much - I hope we can rip it out and replace with either laminate or hardwood. I know a lot of people prefer carpet in bedrooms, but I find it so annoying to clean and my cats are just shredding it. (They don't like closed doors.) I personally don't like our laminate, but I think that's my expensive tastes showing through, haha. The thing I dislike the most is how it's such a repetitive design, but I think they make some laminate that is more natural-looking.

Re: hardwood in the main family room
 

I would love to replace our wretched carpet with either laminate or wood in our first floor. Hubs does not want a hard floor in the living room though and he is right that our living room does not lend itself to an area rug well. If we had a different house I would force the issue and do it. I am barefoot most of the time and prefer how wood feels on my feet versus carpet. The downfall is it can be noisy with smaller children. My girls have wood in their room and we hear everything they do.

Re: hardwood in the main family room
 

My parents have laminate and I think that's louder than hardwood.

Curtains and soft furniture make a huge difference with noise. When my mom put curtains over the blinds in her new piano room she was amazed at the difference; there's much less reverberation. She's got wood cabinets and benches for the most part in that room and putting a few pillows and a new area rug down has made a world of difference. My kids are playing in there right now - Jenga is noisy, but it's clattering off the carpets onto the laminate.

I'm with you, Juniper, I really like the feel of hardwood on bare feet. I'm barefoot most of the time, as are my kids. DH, not so much. If I could, I'd take up the ceramic tile in my kitchen and replace it with wood.

Re: hardwood in the main family room
 

We have stone tile in the living areas (and bathrooms), and carpet in the bedrooms. (We actually replaced the old carpet with new carpet when we moved in - I thought about tile or hardwood or wood laminate, but dh and the kids wanted the softness/warmth of carpet in their bedrooms.) I really love the tile - it's practically indestructible, it's easy to sweep (and it matches the local dirt - the sandy dirt from outside blends right in :shifty) - but it is cool on the feet, more than my mom's laminate.

WRT noise, I noticed a big difference when there was no furniture at all - lots of echoes - but with furniture I haven't noticed much difference compared with our old carpeted house. Although it's a lot louder when you drop things, though. And riding toys do make a lot more noise. Oh, and you can hear the dog's nails on the floor as he walks; it doesn't bother me, but my mom hates the sound of it on her floor (every click sounded like scratches being put into her floor :shifty). We have a few small area rugs that we use to hide cords, but no big ones. What really took getting used to was how much *harder* stone tile over a concrete slab is compared to carpet on wood over a basement. Our feet really hurt the first month - I was worried we were going to need house shoes - but we got used to it :phew. My mom, otoh, has had to constantly wear shoes since she put in laminate - she never got used to the floor being harder.

WRT kids playing - they don't complain about the tile, but they do tend to do floor play in their rooms, or in the master bedroom if they need more room. IDK how much of that is not wanting to sit on tile versus that the toys are in their rooms in the first place. They definitely wanted nice, comfy carpet in their rooms, though. And at my mom's, ds7 did his building on the large area rug instead of on the laminate. They do their fort building in the living room, though. And ds7 rides his fire truck on the tile.


WRT different colors of hardwood between the living areas and the bedrooms, I think that if you picked complementary colors that look good together while also clearly being *different* from each other - so that it doesn't look like you tried to match but failed - that it would look nice.

Re: hardwood in the main family room
 

You could also do parquet or some sort of other pattern that would make the new vs old hardwood look intentional. Although the cost differential may be huge.

Re: hardwood in the main family room
 

Such good info, thanks everyone! I hadn't really considered the noise issue, but I don't think it would be a big deal. It's just one kid, and he doesn't generally get too loud and crazy. When he does, it's with dh in the bedroom when they wrestle. :wink

The room isn't all that big. Between the couch, chair, loveseat, coffee table, and tv stand, we'd really only have room for one large area rug. I was thinking of dark wood. I like the way that looks. The bedrooms are definitely a lighter/reddish wood though. I don't know how that would look. Then there is laminate in the kitchen.

I have absolutely no idea how much this would cost though. It's entirely possible it would cost more than we could really afford, which brings me back to our every six month carpet cleanings. I just really want to make some changes to our home and make it something I like more. It's not that I don't like our home, but I just would like some things to be nicer. My sister just built a nice, big house. Trying not to be envious and thinking about how much house it is to clean, but it really makes me want to be able to make some kind of change to our house.

I'm still mildly concerned about the cold aspect, though I don't notice it in the bedrooms. I always have socks on in the winter, so I don't think it will be a big deal. Now to convince dh! :)

Re: hardwood in the main family room
 

We love our fake hardwood. It’s durable, easy to clean, hard to scratch, helpful with DH’s allergies, and beautiful.

Can you do a similar or complementary color in regards to what’s in your bedroom?

Also, we put a rug down in the living room for DD to play on, but I can’t wait to get rid of it when she’s a little older :shifty I grew up with hardwood and love it so much.


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Re: hardwood in the main family room
 

Hardwood is $12 a sq ft, installed. Nice padding and carpet ( good but not expensive is $4 a sq ft.). We’re doing our basement now.

I’ve been walking barefoot on our hardwood this week. It’s not cold. It’s pretty. I would change our main floor to hardwood if weren’t for the noise and hardness.

I hope you can get what you like.

Re: hardwood in the main family room
 

We are looking at the same sort of thing here. Our living area has the dining room as well and its all a light beige colour...including under the dining table :rolleyes who does that with little kids??

My MIL keeps telling me it will be colder but I've told her it will be less work for me in the long run so I think we will go for hardwood or tiles.'

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We don't have any wall-to-wall carpeting in our house, except on the stairs. I love having an area rug in the living room because I can get them inexpensively and replace them much easier than I can wall-to-wall. We've been in our house 5 years and I'm on my second rug in the living room (5 kids, 2 dogs, 4 cats).

My dh really wants to get wall-to-wall carpeting. Ha ha, he doesn't clean up after pet and kid accidents, I do. Maybe some day.

We built a house a decade ago and spent the money to get the really high quality stain resistant carpeting. Very worth the money. If we ever get carpeting, I will get that again. Not the kind that is applied to the carpet and can wear off, but with fibers that are inherently stain resistant.

---------- Post added at 05:45 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:44 PM ----------

We have waterproof laminate. It's what was here when we moved in. Every single person who comes in to our house is shocked that it's laminate. It looks so real. I wish it was hardwood, though. :shrug