How To Choose The Right Flooring Type For Your Home

Choosing the right type of flooring is an essential but often difficult consideration to make when decorating your home. Not only does flooring set the foundations of a room, but it has to suit your lifestyle while expressing your own personal style. With the wide range of types and textures now available, choosing the best flooring for your home can be a confusing process.

To help you come to the right decision, we have compared each of our flooring types for their durability, price range and style, to guide you in your journey of creating the perfect home, starting from the ground-up.

Carpet

Carpets are often considered as the best choice of flooring for bedrooms, living rooms and other family areas. With their luxurious texture and soft touch, they bring an unrivalled level of comfort and warmth to a space.

In a busy and noisy household, carpets also act as a sound barrier against footfall and sound-systems, while also cushioning any contact - making it the ideal option for a home with little ones or elderly residents.

Although people can be worried about keeping carpets clean, with the right care and maintenance they can last for up to ten years before the texture in the fibres are lost.

Synthetic carpets are usually less expensive, providing ultimate softness but with the practicality of being able to bleach clean it, making it a useful option for families with young children. On the other hand, woollen pattern carpets tend to be on the upper end of the price range, with a highly durable fabric and bold design options that make a statement.

Not only are they often a less expensive option than other flooring types, carpets are quick to install and have unlimited versatility in terms of colours and patterns, meaning you can easily transform your home without compromising on style.

Wood and Engineered Wood

Admired for bringing luxury and depth to a room, wooden flooring looks great in any home setting, whether your taste is classic or modern. With this type of flooring, you have a vast range of looks to choose from, and with every type of wood there is a unique combination of colour and grain, so you are guaranteed individuality and character to suit your own style.

Wooden flooring can be on the more expensive end of the spectrum, however, in terms of durability, wooden flooring really stands the test of time compared to any other floor type, as it can last decades. Therefore it will be a great investment.

Not only that, a wooden floor gives you the option to sand and refinish multiple times, so not only is it highly durable, it gives you the flexibility to update the look of your home without having to replace your flooring, giving you value for your money.

Although less durable than solid wood, engineered wood has become a popular alternative due to its compatibility with underfloor heating and its ability to deal with moisture without becoming warped or damaged.

In a nutshell, engineered wood gives you more practicality while still giving you the beauty of a solid wood flooring.

Before deciding on the wooden floor you want, it's important to consider the demands of the floor in your home. Doing this allows our sales team to point you in the right direction in terms of wood species and finish, to help you get the best out of your wooden flooring and find the right fit for your lifestyle.

Laminate

Laminate flooring is where style and practicality meet; it's straightforward to install, easy to clean, and highly moisture and stain-resistant. Although it has been perceived as cheap and low quality in the past, new engineering techniques have elevated the appearance of laminate to a level of elegance and texture that is so similar to wood or stone, that it can be hard to tell the difference. With a variety of finish options such as embossed, smooth matt or gloss, you can customise laminate flooring to create a home that showcases your own personal style.

Not only does it look great, laminate flooring is also highly functional and cost-effective, allowing you to achieve the look of wood or stone at a fraction of the price.

Unlike real wood, laminate is also resistant to scratching, and has a guarantee of lasting at least 10-25 years, making it a practical flooring option if you have pets, a family home, or if you want to create a stylish living space on a budget.

Vinyl and Luxury Vinyl Tile

For an unrivalled level of resilience and quality at an affordable price, vinyl or luxury vinyl tile (LVT) is the flooring for you and your home. Both options have the same appearance as real wood or stone but, unlike laminate and wood, they are waterproof, making either vinyl or LVT a practical flooring solution for any room in your home, including the kitchen and bathroom.

With a wide range of styles and qualities available, there's a vinyl or LVT floor to suit most budgets, and they have a guarantee of at least 25 years across major brands, making this flooring solution a worthwhile investment.

With their protective layer, vinyl and LVT offer easy day-to-day maintenance with a simple mop and sweep, making them the perfect solution for a durable, low-maintenance floor. This protective layer also prevents against scuffs, scratches and wear-and-tear, which is ideal for high-traffic areas in your home such as hallways and entrances.

As well as being both durable and practical, vinyl and LVT are naturally warm under foot, allowing you to achieve the luxurious appearance of wood or stone but with a level of comfort that cannot be matched by the real thing. The wide range of finishes that these types of flooring offer also means that there is something for you no matter what your taste or style is.

What sets these two types of flooring apart, in addition to the price, is the installation process. While both are straightforward to install, LVT comes in the form of tiles, while vinyl is usually in the form of sheets. With LVT, you have the freedom to mix more than one type of tile and lay them in the direction you choose, allowing you to create a floor that is highly customised to your personal style. LVT also gives you the flexibility to replace a single tile if it becomes damaged, rather than replacing the whole floor.

LVT and vinyl flooring come as a loose fitted option, or as floating fixtures that simply click into place. This makes it a great flooring option for a home DIY project, or you opt for a professional fitting to have the installation process taken care of for you.

If you're considering new flooring for your home, a member of our flooring team will be able to help and advise you, and answer any questions you may have. You can find out more by clicking here.