Before you settle on the type of flooring you want in your new house or as a replacement for the current flooring that just isn’t doing the trick, you should create a checklist of important things to keep in mind when it comes to choosing the perfect flooring for your home. You may wind up saving yourself a great deal of time and money by taking thirty minutes to get down to the brutally honest brass tacks about what you expect from your flooring.
Activities
Ask yourself what kind of activities will be engaged upon your new flooring? It is a basic living space where there will be heavy traffic from a variety of shapes and sizes of people as well as an array of shoe types? Is there a realistic chance that someone may be sleeping on this floor at times? What is the water situation like? Kitchens and bathrooms create moisture problems that make them not exactly suitable to some of the flooring options you have available when it comes to bedrooms or home offices. You’ll want durable flooring that requires little maintenance if kids are going to be playing on it. You’ll want something soft beneath your feet for the floor of a kitchen or an arts and crafts studio. Think hard about the exact type of activities that will be taking place upon the floor: dancing, aerobic exercising, cooking, painting, relaxing on the furniture.
Outdoor Access
A floor that provides direct access to the outdoors need to be durable enough to handle the heavy traffic. You also want something that will clean up with little effort when mud and dirt and sand and grass are tracked into the area linking indoors to outdoors.
Moisture
As discussed earlier, flooring in the bathroom and kitchen needs to take into consideration the potential for water problems. This doesn’t mean just the water that may sprinkle from the tap onto the floor when cooking or bathing. Be prepared for the toilet backing up or the kitchen sink drain overflowing because you were very naughty and poured grease from a frying pan down the drain. Flooring in rooms where a plumbing emergency is a very real threat need to be of a material that is easily cleaned and doesn’t require you to pull it all up and replace if that plumbing emergency arrives Schwarzenegger-sized.
Soundproofing
Some flooring materials provided natural acoustic soundproofing while others make a simple walk down the hall sound like you’re inside a Smithsonian Institute. If you don’t want the sound of your kids playing video games to travel, consider a flooring material that muffles the transmission of sound. Flooring is a vital component that can transform a room where you want movies into a bona fide home theater experience.
Pets
Pets need to come into the equation when choosing flooring. Dander is much more easily spotted and cleaned off a hardwood floor than it is on shag carpeting. If you’ve got indoor pets, you absolutely must take them into consideration when choosing a flooring material.
Maintenance
Just how much time are you willing to put into upkeep of your new floor? A little? A lot? Plan on making maintenance an everyday occurrence. Be as ruthless as a coke dealer making a deal with a celebrity when it comes to being honest about just how much time you will really put into maintaining your floor. Keep in mind that vinyl tiles don’t hide dirt nearly as well as carpeting.
Durability
How long do you plan on keeping the flooring? Have you already started making plans to move to a new house within the next ten years? If you know this house is a way station, don’t go for the super durable and long-lasting flooring material. Go for the good looks that you can kiss goodbye. On the other hand, if the house has been in your family since Iran was the answer to the question posed to your great-grandfather in the form of “What did you do when the bear knocked over the outhouse, gampaw,” then you probably want to get the most durable and long-lasting flooring material you can afford.
