[forty-two]

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 ) - 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 ). 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 . 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.