Carpets or Wood: Making the Best Flooring Choice

Making the best flooring choice

It’s a debate which has raged for years now and doesn’t look to be concluded any time soon. Carpets or wooden floors in the home – which is the better choice? Well, for starters, that depends on who is living there (carpets can make allergies worse). You  may also have kids who need a soft floor to sit on when playing and just how tolerant are your neighbours when it comes to the ear-shattering sound of high heels walking across upper floorboards? In other words, it’s all about lifestyle. Find out how to make the best flooring choice.

Certainly the hankering of home owners for floorboards over carpets has been a growing trend for a couple of decades now. The most popular types of wooden flooring these days is produced from either engineered or reclaimed wood, but there is also some incredibly textured laminate, such as these Arte tiles with a polished concrete effect.

Both engineered and reclaimed wood have beautiful textures and can be stained or varnished in a colour of your choice, with grey currently proving extremely fashionable.

In order to help you choose we’ve listed what we consider the benefits of both wood and carpeting.

The benefits of wooden flooring

1. They don’t exacerbate allergies
2. It doesn’t need cleaned as often
3. It doesn’t show the same wear as carpet in high traffic areas
4. It’s easier to clean up a spilled drink or fallen food
5. It doesn’t absorb smells to the same extent as a carpet
6. Wood is ‘neutral’ so tends to fit in with many décor schemes
7. Sweeping a wooden floor is easier than vacuuming a carpet
8. It may be more expensive initially but hardwood lasts longer than carpeting

The benefits of carpeting

1. It feels gorgeous under your feet
2. It adds a cosy and lived-in feeling to any room
3. It’s great in winter where it will retain heat
4. It’s often less expensive than wooden flooring
5. It’s easier to clean than wood (which needs to swept every other day and mopped regularly)
6. Carpet is much quicker to install than wood
7. Patterned carpet can make a big design impact
8. Newer carpets have stain resistant fibres and today’s vacuum cleaners are more efficient

And now we’ve come up with a compromise:

Wooden flooring and rugs

But why shouldn’t you have both? A nice balance for your home is to opt for wooden flooring and large area rugs. The latter can help define a particular area in your room.

Many interior designers use a rug to ‘tie a room together’, and unite items that otherwise may seem to be a bit ‘out on their own,’ giving the room a sparse look (especially if it’s a large room and the furniture is far apart). Our Pixel Blue rug nicely ‘pulls in’ the blue chair and cupboards in the kitchen, as well as the green artwork.

An area rug can also provide a nice contrast to what’s already in the room. A sitting room with a neutral beige sofa and pale wooden table would certainly come to life with a brightly patterned rug in its centre.

Inspired? Then find a colourful range of rugs, carpets and wooden flooring options at our website Valefurnishers.co.uk  today.