Carpet or Wooden Floor?

When looking for a new floor for your house, you are being bombarded with a huge choice of flooring materials. All the manufacturers claim that their product is the best and you should choose theirs over the competitor’s one.

Two of the most popular flooring products are carpets and wooden floor. None of them are perfect and have advantages and disadvantages. I will try to go through some of the pro’s an con’s of both.

Carpets

They have been used as a floor covering for many hundreds of years. They come in a variety of colours, designs, thicknesses and are made using a huge range of yarns. The most popular yarns are wool, polypropylene and nylon.

Advantages of carpets:

almost infinite palette of colours and designs

comfortable to walk on

they thermally insulate the floor

they are easy and cheap to fit

they keep around 90% of allergens on the floor, stopping them from becoming airborne

they provide a better sound for the room since the carpet stops the sound bouncing off the floor

carpet provides a sound insulation between floors

Disadvantages of carpets:

carpets can easily be permanently stained

they have a shorter life span than wooden floors

Wooden floors

Wooden floors have been used by man since for more than 2000 years. Wood stands out from other materials through it’s durability, look and variety of wood essences available. A well maintained wooden floor should last more than 100 years without the need to replace it. It has some disadvantages though. Below are some of the advantages and disadvantages of solid wood floors.

Advantages of wooden floors:

long lasting

easy to clean

a wide variety of wood essences and colours

Disadvantages of wooden floors:

expensive to buy

costly and time consuming installation

almost no sound and thermal insulation

easily scratched and marked

needs a lot of maintenance to keep it looking good

needs constant brushing/vacuuming

susceptible to warping and buckling if installed incorrectly or not dry when installed

sensitive to even low amounts of moisture

Above were some of the advantages and disadvantages of wooden floors and carpets.

Choosing the wrong flooring materials can be very costly. Carpet is a lot more versatile than wooden flooring due to the fact that it can be made from a wide variety of fibres to suit any environment. Carpets are easy to install and quite cheap when you compare them to wood flooring. They come in a wide range of colours and qualities, from the classic wool twist carpet to the most modern nylon saxony. Carpet are very easily integrated in your property’s colour scheme due to the fact that it comes in a huge range of colours and designs.

The easiest way to compare carpets and wood flooring is to walk into your nearest carpet shop and see what they have to offer. There are a lot of internet retailers that sell carpets and wood but it is difficult to tell the real colours and feel of a carpet just by looking at a picture.