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Flooring Thoughts
I've been asked a lot of questions about
flooring lately, so I decided to put together some thoughts on the
flooring materials.
Carpeting:
- Carpeting stinks. But it feels nice to bare feet.
- Really, it does smell, especially if
you own a dog or two. Get down with your nose on the carpet and
breathe deeply. Smell nice?
- Carpeting is great for wildlife… dust mites, pollen,
animal dander, dirt, etc. All sorts of allergens live in carpeting.
- If you use chemicals on your lawn, you
will soon have them embedded deep in your carpet. Carpeting is a
sponge, and who knows what it's soaking up.
- Carpeting wears down way too fast. Only commercial-grade thin-pile carpeting will last any decent length of time, from my experience.
- Carpeting is a big environmental waste. In 10 or 15 years, or less, your new carpeting is going to be hauled off to the county dump. You may get as few as 2-5 years out of new carpet before it starts to show signs of wear.
- Carpeting stretches as you move your office chair over it.
- Carpeting gets stained.
- Small children don't get hurt bad when
they fall on carpet.
Vinyl:
- They are all man-made and may reflect a current style trend that may not look good in just a few years.
- Low-priced vinyl is junk.
- Better grades, like Congoleum at $30 a square yard, last a long time.
- I have never seen a vinyl tile
flooring product that I would describe as truly durable. The edges
always seem to peel up.
- With vinyl you get what you pay for. Buy as high a grade as you can afford, and avoid trendy styles, patterns or colors.
Ceramic Tile:
- Durable.
- Feet, legs and back may get tired from standing on
a hard floor for a long time.
- When you drop a glass on a tile floor, breakage is guaranteed.
- Ceramic tiles are man-made and may reflect a current style trend that may not look good in just a few years.
- Cold feeling, but that can be overcome with an
electric floor-warming system.
Natural Stone:
- Same benefits as ceramic tile without the man-made look.
- Expensive.
- Timeless beauty.
- Will almost certainly add value to the home.
- Financially one of the best decisions, because it should never need replacing. There is no further expense beyond simple sealing every 10 to 15 years.
- Many natural stone products are porous
and will absorb some stains, such as red wine or grape juice. But
sealing the floor should minimize this problem.
- Natural stone may be brittle. I’m always afraid of dropping a hammer on the marble floor I installed last year. But if you buy a little extra, a broken tile can be replaced.
Real Hardwood:
- Expensive, about $3.50 to $4.00 a square foot for material here in Northern Michigan. Installed cost is about $8 to $9 a square foot here.
- Feels slightly cool to bare feet, but not objectionable.
- Modern premium finishes (such as so-called "Swedish Floor Finishes") are very scratch resistant.
- There are "No-Sand" types of hardwood flooring. These have a small bevel around the perimeter of each board so your feet don’t snag any raised edges.
This might be a good choice for an existing house where the sanding dust would create a problem.
- Hardwood can be dented or gouged, but these can be repaired.
- Hardwood floors last forever. When they become scratched badly, you just have to rent a sander and grind off the top layer and refinish. I’ve seen houses built 50 to 100 years ago that still have their original hardwood floors. This fact alone speaks volumes about wise flooring material choices.
Simulated Hardwood / Plastic Laminate
- Sounds appealing… you can have a new floor in a few hours with no sanding and no odor from oil-based finishes.
- The finish layer is essentially countertop material, and very thin.
- I’m afraid that a few small flaws in installation might leave gaps that water could enter. Since there is no finish applied over the
entire surface, as with real hardwood, any small gap will let water behind the protective surface, which will affect the substrate wood in some way. Avoid any flooring with particle board backing.
- I have been in several houses and businesses with laminate flooring, and I can detect them by the time I’ve taken my first step onto the floor. They have a thin, hollow sound, especially when installed as a "floating" floor with no staples. I personally don’t like that tinny sound. It sounds cheap to me.
- While Pergo claims to have been around for 25 years… I’ve been around longer, and I’m skeptical.
- 25 years is a blink of an eye in the building materials industry. I put my faith in products that have stood the test of
centuries. I’ve seen laminate countertops that have worn through in less than a decade. When I have seen several laminate floors that are more than 20 years old, and holding up very well, THEN I will be convinced.
Flooring takes a beating. Americans wear their shoes in the house… and who blames them? I don’t want to spend half my day tying shoe laces. I don’t remember where it was, but once I got some spiral steel shavings stuck in the treads of my shoes. It made a lot of tiny slices in the vinyl kitchen floor of my first house. It is so easy to get small stones stuck in your shoes… and then you are dragging rocks (or razor blades, as I once did) all through your house.
I’ll tell you what I would do with my own house. If the house was below average in price and I was on a low budget, I would install good quality vinyl flooring (not vinyl peel-and-stick tiles) in the "wet and wear" areas… kitchen, bath, entry, and hallways. I would do good neutral carpeting (no pattern or texture), as dark a color as I could tolerate, in the other areas.
But what I would prefer, and what I would recommend to anybody who owns a house that is above-average in value, is natural stone (marble, slate, granite) in the "wet and wear" areas and real hardwood in the living room, dining room, and bedrooms. And then buy some nice oriental rugs. You’ll pay more up front but will probably get the money back when you sell (flooring finishes are often reported on appraisals, I’m told). And if you stay for a long time, you won’t have any major expense of flooring replacement. You might be farther ahead financially to borrow the money for good flooring (assuming it doesn’t out-class the rest of the house) and pay it back over 5 to 10 years.
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I am absolutely IN LOVE with the Turkish marble floor I installed last year in two bathrooms. The tiles cost $6 a square foot at Menard’s (a mid-western chain) and the floor warming cables were about $3-4 a square foot. I have no idea what installation would cost, it should be the same as ceramic tile. |
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Similarly, I absolutely ADORE the white oak hardwood flooring I installed two years ago in one bedroom. It took a day to install with a rented pneumatic flooring stapler (don’t think of staples, think of 2-legged nails, 2" long). It took a day to sand with a rented drum sander, and it was hard work!
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It took a few hours over 3 days to apply 3 coats of Varathane floor
urethane, which is not exactly a premium finish.
| The flooring has had no movement, no serious gaps, and in spite of sometimes having 5 dogs laying, running and playing on it, there are surprisingly few scratches in the finish. I’ve left the window open and had puddles of rain water to mop up, but no damage at all. I’m skeptical if Pergo could beat that. I’ll admit I have a bias for natural products that have proved themselves.
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I’ve noticed that whenever someone buys a fixer-upper house and sells it right away, they always install cheap carpet and cheap vinyl, because the person paying for the materials isn’t the one who has to live with the consequences.
Bruce W. Maki, Editor
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