Choosing the right flooring for your family

When is comes to choosing our homes decor, Hubby is happy to let me do the decision-making whilst we tend to refer to his role as the “muscle”.

I never realised how much of an issue it was moving furniture out the way with a young family around until we had our bedroom carpet replaced last year.  Physically removing all items of furniture from the room, along with all the washing that seems to accumulate in our room not only took time, but it also had to go somewhere whilst the work was done, so effectively ruled out the use of upstairs for most of the day.

When making the decision about which flooring to choose it is advisable to look into all the options and decide which would work best for your family.  When we moved into our house there was laminate flooring in the back bedroom which belonged to Abbey. I couldn’t wait to replace it with carpet as it made her room very noisy and you could hear every footstep or anything accidentally dropped on the floor.

It was the opposite downstairs though, our old thick pile carpet was at the end of its life and I longed for something more modern and easy to keep with a young family.  I looked into wood options, but around the same time my Dad had a wooden floor installed in his house and one child with a Hot Wheels car managed to leave a huge visible scratch along the hall floor, so that ruled that out for me.

I did consider tiles briefly, but they are not very kind on small people who land on their bottom when learning to walk, so that left me the choice between vinyl or laminate flooring which are more able to stand the test of small people.

One of the things I wish I had considered was how the flooring would be installed.  Some flooring can be floated, which means installation without glue or fasteners and is the easiest to remove should you decide to replace them when the kids are older and this can be done with laminate, which is also scratch and scuff resistant.

Looking bag I wish I had gone for the Laminate option, but I chose vinyl which was glued to the original tiled floors.  It took a long time to get the smell of glue out of the house and much as it looked fabulous at the time, it was not finished well and randomly stops at the doors with nothing to blend it into the next room. It is also almost impossible to get marks out of and on a couple of incidents of furniture being dropped down the stairs or a toy with a sharp edge being dragged along, there are small, noticeable tears in the floor.

What flooring have you found the best with a young family at home?

 

 

 

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