How to Choose the Perfect Flooring

I love flooring. It can make a room look amazing – and also make a room look downright terrible. 5 quick tips for choosing the right flooring for you and your room.

1. Durability: Do you have children? How clumsy are you? What is the likelihood that someone is going to drop a glass bowl on your tile floor in your kitchen and crack a tile? For me, that likelihood it high. When I cook, I’m all over the place and likely drinking wine and dancing to music – in other words, it’s very likely I’ll drop something. Also, I have a 2-year old son who will pound on floors with hammers if he can find them. If you want a durable floor, choose very hard wood. The Janka rating of the wood tells you how hard it is; click here to check out the scale. We chose bamboo flooring for our kitchen – a very hard wood. If you choose a wood like pine, that can dent simply by walking on it with very pointy heels!

2. Style: Of course this matters tremendously but is all about personal preference. In my kitchen I chose wide-plank hand scraped bamboo flooring and I think it’s GORGEOUS. Check out the picture below. It fits the look and feel of the room. We purchased it from Lumber Liquidators – click here to check out exactly what we purchased.

If you are going for a cozy, warm feel, consider carpet or wood floors with large rugs.

3. Grout: Here’s where I struggle. I hate dirty grout. I think I lived in too many apartments with horribly dirty grout between the tiles of the bathroom floor and in the shower walls – hah. I recommend colored grout if you do a tile floor. It looks nice and will hide dirt better.

4. Warmth: It seems like a lot of people hate carpet these days. I don’t love the look or the durability of it BUT it’s been great to have with a 2-year old who learned to walk on it and plays on it every day. It’s warm, it’s soft when they fall down, it’s not slippery, etc. Therefore, I think “warmth” is a good consideration when choosing flooring. Our carpet looks pretty nice still after about 5 years of wear. Also, lack of warmth is one of the main reasons why my husband doesn’t like tile floors.

5. Ease of Installation: This is a DIY website. If you are going to install your own flooring, definitely consider the methods you will have to use to get the job done. In both our kitchens and our bathrooms we simply put the new flooring over the old one. It was simple and it didn’t matter that we left the old one. Just make sure that your floor is fairly level first and make sure to put down an underlayment first if you are laying wood floor on top of old flooring. Our wood floor in our kitchen is click lock flooring, which made it easy to piece together. My husband added glue between the boards to ensure the fit was perfect. Basically just make sure you consider the level of effort you want to put in before purchasing your flooring. Check out the below picture of our work in progress, showing our terrible old flooring, the underlayment in the middle and the new wood floor as well.