Talk to me about flooring!

[mathnerd]

Background: Two years ago I applied for SSI for both of my boys who have the bone disease. One was approved right away and the other one was just approved this month. The way this works for minors is that they do give you the back pay from the date of the application, but the money has to go into a dedicated account and you can only spend it on certain approved expenses. I'm getting about $18,000 in back pay, but only have $8000 in approved expenses (paying back the friend who fronted me the money for my car, and other smaller loans extended to me by other friends who've helped keep me afloat for the last few years), so we're looking for things that we need that we can justify to the Social Security Administration. One of the things that's approved is modifications to the home. The child's primary disability is the bone disease, but he also has asthma. Given the asthma, we could justify replacing the 40 year old bright orange carpets with hardwood or laminate.

With that in mind, here's a little about the house. It's a tri-level split, and we're only looking at doing the top and middle floors, excluding the bathrooms and front entry way. The bottom floor already has newer, low allergen carpets down, so if we run out of money, we'll simply not do the bottom floor. The "desperate to replace" flooring is about half the house, which by my extremely rough measurements is about 2100 square feet. There are two sets of stairs involved, plus two mini sets of stairs (the main floor isn't all one level...there's a step down into the living room and formal dining room from the front hallway and informal dining room respectively). I'd like whatever we put down to be reasonably consistent, but it doesn't necessarily have to be the same. It also needs to be easy to keep clean. I can't deal with flooring that needs anything more than sweeping and mopping.

So given all that, what would you guys suggest?

[TheSHAD0W]

There are a number of different ways you could go. Linoleum and linoleum tile floor are inexpensive, but wear can be a problem. The same is true of much of the cheaper laminate flooring, although I've found some that wasn't expensive but looked to be better.

The thing you really have to watch with laminate flooring is the thickness of the top-most layer. Some of the cheap stuff has a top layer about as thin as paper, and is about as durable; scrape it, and you've got a very noticeable mark. A heavier layer may take dings, but at worst it will look like a distressed wood floor, and you can apply polyurethane over it to give it back the shine and make it look more regular. I've found and used some cheap snap-together laminate flooring that looked a bit funky (sixties funky) but proved to have a nice thick top layer. Snap-together flooring can work really well but you have to make sure to set it up right, with an underlayment to allow it to move as well as a gap around the perimeter to let it expand and contract with temperature changes. You'll need to cover the gap with a baseboard, removing any old baseboard before laying the floor.

Linoleum with a thicker top layer is nearly difficult or impossible to find. The exception is commercial-grade linoleum tile, which is excellent stuff but may look odd in a residential setting. I've used it in bathrooms and laundry rooms. They're typically white or a light color with speckles, and the pigment is full-thickness so they can be deeply scraped without the damage being obvious.

Real hardwood isn't impossible but is of course expensive. It's available in everything from thin slats that need to be glued down to stay flat to heavy boards meant to be nailed to a subfloor. Unless you're trying to make the house a show-piece this might be overkill.

I've also occasionally seen softwood flooring. This will rapidly become distressed and will require periodic refinishing or waxing, but can produce an interesting effect. It's also rather inexpensive.

[mathnerd]

I think linoleum throughout the house is a bad idea. We're kinda broke, but the house was built with high end finishings, so I don't want to cheapen the overall look. Also I don't want to kill the value. Even in its current state (in need of some TLC), it's still valued at around $750k (and needs about $150k in work to make it nice again). That's one of the reasons I'm leaning towards hardwood, or even engineered hardwood. I'm just not sure about the alternatives to hardwood. Ugh. I hate spending large sums of money.

[bbbr]

It's worth peeling up a corner of the carpet if you can to see just what lays below-that's how the original hardwood in my house was discovered. Took a lot of work on my end to finish them (they were installed and then promptly buried under carpet and linoleum without sealing them) but the effort was worth it.

My parents have gone two routes with hardwood flooring- for the family cabin in the Adirondacks, we made the floor out of fresh cut, rough sawn red oak (lots of time spent curing the wood, planning, jointing and trimming to like lengths and widths). We're about 5 years into the flooring project since we aren't up there all the time but it;ll look good when it's finally done next year. The other route is a full thickness bamboo laminate flooring in their home to cover the original scarred up pine floor boards. We've layed about 200 sq feet so far, no real issues with tools getting dropped on it. But we did find that you can't drag tools over it or it gets scuffed. A little bit of polish cleaned it right up though.