The floor of your home is a lot more important than you might think. There are various materials that can be used to cover the ground of your house. The one you choose really does just depend on your tastes. Between hardwood flooring, vinyl tiling, carpeting or regular tiles and more there’s an answer for everyone depending on your needs or wants. However, the biggest question seems to be over to carpet or not to carpet? So, first of all, let’s look at the pros and cons of carpet.
Pros
- Carpet is so much more comfortable than hardwood or tile floors. Sitting on the floor and leaning up against the couch or wall just isn’t the same without carpet. Of course, you can have a rug but it just doesn’t offer than same cozy, welcoming feel. If you have guests over and run out of seating space, it’s uncomfortable for guests to just try and make themselves at home and pick a spot on the floor.
- In the winter time, you don’t have to worry so much about paying to heat your floors. It’s not a necessity because carpet won’t feel terrible on your feet in the cold mornings. It is also a good insulator so your energy bill might go down when you have the heating on. It helps the room to stay a little warmer and retains the heat better than tile, vinyl, hardwood, marble or any other kind of flooring that isn’t carpet.
- One of the nicest things about carpet is that if you pick up the random items that don’t belong in a room and run the vacuum over it, it looks like you have spent a long time getting the room clean. Something about vacuum lines speaks clean to the room.
Cons
- Carpet can harbor dust and dirt so much more than hardwood or floors that don’t have fibers to attach to. This can up allergies and cause people to sneeze or cough or have respiratory issues more than if you didn’t have carpet. Especially if someone is sitting or laying on it and is breathing in whatever is trapped in the carpet; it can be very bad for you.
- You never know what the padding under the carpet looks like. If you spill water or other liquids on carpet, they seep down into the padding underneath the carpet. Because the carpet is covering it, the padding never seems to dry properly and can start getting moldy. This will cause you house to smell like mildew and is potentially dangerous for you to breathe in, depending on what type of mold it is.
- Carpets are a lot harder to clean. Once you get a spot, it’s hard to get it out. You could have the carpets regularly steamed, but if the blemish is on the padding, it will just keep coming through onto the carpet, no matter how many times you try and clean it off. Plus, steaming all the time can get expensive. Regular sweeping and mopping of floors that do not have carpet is much cheaper.
If you are going to be redoing your floors, then you should make sure that you do a lot of research and either, figure out how to properly care for carpet from the very beginning or decide on the type of non carpeted floor that would work for you. You can beat the cold floors by using vinyl or hardwood or something like that instead of tile or marble. You can get plush rugs that fill up the entire room if you really don’t like the non carpeted feel. Then, once the rug starts to get dingy and old, you can throw it away and replace it with almost no hassle. Even if it takes you a little while to find a new one, at least your home will still be usable. This way as well, you won’t have to worry about people staining the rug or something happening to it. When you have settled in your mind that something is disposable, you don’t really tend to mind so much when it gets a little damaged. That can make it a lot more enjoyable to have people over.