Rug verses wood flooring?

I love wood flooring. Awful stuff lives in carpet. You can add area rugs in winter if you want.

Purely a matter of personal choice. I am partial to wood flooring and think it is a wonderful idea. Things to take into consideration: your lifestyle, do you have messy kids or pets where every scratch, nick and scuff mark will send you into orbit? Then wood floors may not be a good choice. You state you have rugs in those rooms now. Does that mean wall to wall carpeting? What other flooring is in the house? Would the new wood meet up with existing flooring? Taking carpet out and laying wood can make the house "echo" and you will hear every step unless you are a barefoot or sock family. Would the footsteps bother anyone in the house? You may want decent sized area rugs to absorb some of the sound and for aesthetic reasons or to provide different seating areas. Allow for that in your budget, as they can get expensive quickly for quality rugs.

Have you considered other flooring options? I am certainly not a fan of laminate for more reasons than I can count. I just ripped a bunch of it out of my house and replaced with hardwood myself.

Another thing to consider is cleaning. I think hardwood is easy to maintain even with a house full of pets, but that is purely my personal opinion.

Hopefully this will give you some food for thought. Hope it helps!

Yep, I love wood flooring, we have a living room/dining room-large open space and it was carpeted for many years, when we had it removed to lay a ceramic floor down, you should have seen the mess that came out with the carpet! Disgusting. To this day I don't know why we didn't have it done earlier.

True, the hard floor is noisier, but area rugs may be an option, furniture and drapes absorb the noise too.

if you mean wall/wall carpet, I'd ditch it, and go with 'area' rugs

I HATE carpet. It holds dirt no matter how much you vacuum or what brand you use. Even steam cleaning does not get everything out. Also, 90% of the "dust" that you see when it is pulled up and removed is actually dead skin cells. Ewwww!

I have had hard surfaces in my entire house, hardwood everywhere except the tiled kitchen and baths. It's so easy to clean and as I age, my back is happier with not fighting a vacuum on carpet. My sister in law has carpet and a self propelled vacuum and it still hurts to use it.

My advice is go hardwood. If you have kids and dogs you may want to consider the waterproof kind. They make them much nicer these days and look just like hardwood. The old style of that and laminates looked and sounded like laminates. Not true now. I know this because I am rebuilding my dad's house that caught fire. This is a type flooring I will definitely be using in the finished basement but may also be installed in the entire house. Whatever brand you buy there are several with a lifetime warranty or 50 years. Surprisingly, their prices are similar to those without. I'd do that and stay with a well name brand.

The only other suggestion I would make is put scratch proof bottoms on your dining room chairs. The constant pulling them in and out will scratch the floor, no matter what brand. Stop it before it starts with the chair leg protectors. They have many styles and prices, but worth the cost.

My house has all hardwood floors, many of them painted. These floors are oak, painted. It is two adjacent rooms; sitting and dining. The d.r. was painted first, well over 30 years ago. I have not repainted it, and while we don't eat there daily we walk through this room constantly. We have certainly had many meals there in 30+ years and the paint has not been scraped by the chairs, although it has by the hassock my husband uses in the sitting room, but that gets many times daily pushing back and forth. I love wood floors and don't mind rugs as they can be rotated, cleaned off site and changed. I feel smothered by wall to wall carpeting. the blue floor is pine and the paint does get worn off because we eat there and pull chairs in and out, but painted floors are very easy to touch up.

My allergist recommended carpet as it would "capture the allergens" and reduce my exposure to them. It would keep them from floating in the air. Frankly I find the carpet to be too much maintenance. Constantly vacuuming and it requires someone to come in yearly to deep clean. Wood is so much easier to sweep, vacuum, or mop. And I just prefer the look of wood. We are switching out most of our carpet this summer.

Most allergists say to get rid of carpets and rugs.