Flooring Options for our Dream House

My choices would be tiles for kitchen and bathroom carpet for bedrooms and wooden floors for living areas . With the wooden floors I recommend you buy solid wood as expensive as you can afford.

Yes I agree with twice We have exactly what she suggests. Our solid wood is light oak parquee (spelling!) and we have always been pleased with it. In the living and dining room we have put down relatively expensive rugs - they are heavy and so don't move - and the effect is good.

jessmatt Whilst I am more than happy with what we have down in our small apartment if we where doing as you are I would have to go with big tiles for the kitchen/utility etc in ceramic with the quartz that shines through it and for the main flooring to lounges and reception I would look at the best solid wood you can find,I'd suggest looking at Italian/Spanish importers for the best choice well worth the footwork and the time it will take. I would also choice big big chandeliers for best effect if open plan.

Tiles are very unforgiving if you drop crockery or glass!

And shiny gloss floor tiles are a slip hazard in kitchens and bathrooms, even if they do look lovely. We have tiled floors in these areas but they have a textured finish.

We have Karndean flooring downstairs, there was no way we could afford real wood. It has been excellent, easy to keep clean and very hard wearing. It has been down for eleven years now and is still as good as new.

Bamboo.

DD has Karndean - excellent stuff. Good looking and bomb proof!

I love my tiled kitchen floor, but lve just dropped a Pyrex jug!!

They shatter into a million pieces!

Mind you it is the first time I've ever dropped anything. x

I don't care, I just love my tiled kitchen floors and always have one put in, they last for ever. I do drop things occasionally but I still think it's worth having tiles. No worry about burns or wearing through lino.

We put down a modern pattern of parquet tiles in light oak too, downstairs, it looks lovely and is so easy to keep clean.

I did have the stairs carpeted, I chose a stripe that goes up the stairs as it doesn't show the debris. Upstairs is carpeted to minimise noise, although I would like to have wood really. the upstairs bathroom is wood, the downstairs is tiles. Not slippery ones though, they have a rough surface and in some areas there are lots of little ones like large mosaic that provide extra grip.

Outside - have a look at the Stonemarket website. We have just bought a load of stuff from them, and the price includes delivery. The slabs are nice and thick and were the best value and quality that we could find.

www.stonemarket.co.uk/

I had my tiles lifted , involved a kango hammer and many bad words , and have cushionfloor now , easy to stand and walk on and cleans up well . It is a lot warmer too and thhings bounce

Cushion floor for me too. I once dropped a bottle of tomato ketchup on a red quarry tile floor. Cleaning it up was a nightmare. Shards of glass everywhere. Cushion floor is more forgiving, easy to clean and warm to the feet too. Yes, they bounce!

We had our tiles removed too. They went in the great kitchen re-jig of 2007. Have lovely warm cushion floor tiles now. Even the most fragile of things bounce, I love it.

I have Amtico in kitchen and bathrooms but carpets in lounges and bedrooms and up the stairs.

We put Karndean in our new kitchen extension two years ago and I'd recommend it. It looks like new and is so easy to care for. We chose the Karndean over Amtico for price and because we preferred the Karndean parquet look.

Tiles in the bathroom but with underfloor heating. The stairs and bedrooms were carpeted about 5 years ago so won't need replacing for a while yet. We had wooden oak floors in the hall and front room 7 years ago, fantastic. The other sitting room has just been laid with a click n fix laminate which has some kind of oak photo stuff as the top layer.

Have fun choosing

I'm going to have tiles in my hallway as I find it gets very grubby with walking the dog in and out. I do need the whole house recarpeting and I have saved up the money to do it, but I've got so much furniture and junk I don't know where to start. I assume that carpet fitters will also move furniture [at a cost] but what do I do with the piano in the living room etc?

Maybe put an advert in a local shop asking for 'muscle' on the day for a couple of hours. My sister had to co-ordinate moving in, having windows removed and fitted with new ones and the piano going through the empty frames as well as new carpet, all on the same day. She booked one extra man for the afternoon, which could perhaps be rather expensive. I stayed out of the way and unpacked the kitchen! It went, carpet out of removed window, vacuum, new carpets down, piano in, man go home, new window in.

Not long after we moved into our house, we had all the downstairs carpets removed and some very good German laminate flooring put down. They did half the room, then moved my upright piano ( which has those nylon gliding castor cups under the castors so is very easy to move) onto that half, did the other half and moved the piano back again. It seemed to be no effort and didn't harm or mark the the floor. A grand might be a different proposition! The castor cups were quite expensive, but it does make moving the piano about a doddle.

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Tegan there are specialist firms of piano movers who will move pianos from one room to another. The have a special trolley and a two man team made it look very easy when we had ours moved. Google Piano Movers and find one for your area. John Lewis charged us £30 per room for moving the furniture, but they don't do pianos.

I did think about getting rid of the piano; it isn't a particularly good one and my daughter [who used to play it] has a better one of her own now. But it think my little grandaughter might like tinkering about on it when she's older...my own kids loved doing so when they visited people with pianos, which is why I bought one.

I used to work for a firm of specialist carpet cleaners and repairers and also supplied new carpets. I ran the admin for several teams of fitters. We used to ask people what furniture was in their rooms and it was not unusual to turn up and find they'd been economical with the truth to say the least, but it was to their disadvantage as we charged fitting by the hour in most cases, and the job just took longer and cost more. It's not often that carpet fitters have the luxury of working in empty rooms.

The carpet fitters I use insist on an empty room before they start work, DH and I have nearly crippled ourselves shifting the piano and large cabinets.

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