Congratulations! You just purchased your first home, placing you among the land owning gentry. Whether you are building your home from the ground up or you purchased an already constructed home, there is always a chance that you will need to pick out and have a new floor installed. Unless you had family deal with the same thing at some point in your life, it’s something you probably haven’t dealt with before. Here is some helpful advice for flooring in your new home.
Residential Carpet is Out
One of the recent trends in the world of flooring is the emergence of traditional hardwood flooring as the flooring of choice for the majority of the world. Hardwood flooring has always been a mainstay in the flooring world, but at some point in the last 50 or 60 years, carpet became the norm. This is why you see so many nice hardwood floors covered up by awful shag carpet in a lot of older buildings.
Hardwood flooring has come back for a reason. It is a lot easier to take care of, since you can just mop up any spills when they happen and you don’t have to worry about water damaging the floor. Hardwood flooring also lasts longer than carpet. Once it is installed, it will be there for decades, provided you take care of it. Carpet, on the other hand, gets ruined by many things very easily.
Traditional Hardwood Flooring Can be Installed Very Easily
One of the nice things about flooring these days is that a lot of flooring manufacturers are designing their products with DIY’ers in mind. This means that instead of hiring a flooring company to install the floor for you – a choice that can definitely drive up the price of the whole process – you can easily install the floors yourself. This is especially true for hardwood flooring and linoleum plank flooring since those materials can be installed in a snap. Literally. With tongue and groove pieces, you just snap one piece into the next. These are much more common than they used to be.
Of course, you’ll still need to measure and cut the pieces yourself – and problems can still arise if you don’t have a lot of experience with this kind of work. It might be a good idea to keep the number for a flooring company on hand in case things get hairy.
Do Not be Afraid to Include Multiple Types of Materials
This might seem like a no-brainer, but just because you have hardwood flooring in the main rooms does not mean you cannot have residential carpet in your bedroom. Just make sure that you’re putting the right materials in the right rooms. For example, you wouldn’t put carpet in the kitchen and you probably wouldn’t put ceramic tiling in the bedroom. But other than that, go wild with it! Flooring is one of the easiest ways to make your home really feel like your home.
The floors in your home are yours and yours alone to choose, but it can be a tricky process, especially if you’ve never looked into them before. If you live in the Nashville or Middle Tennessee area, it contact the professionals at Ozburn-Hessey for a little help, whether that be installation or picking out something you will love.
