Are there any drawbacks to wood floors?

[cornflake girl]

We are considering putting in wood floors (bamboo) and I don't really know much about them. I've read lots of positive things in this forum about wood floors - but are there any negatives to them? The only thing someone mentioned to me is that they are hard to keep clean. At first I was a bit put off. After thinking about it though, I figured that's actually a positive, not a negative. I mean, if you see grime building up on your floor, all that same grime would be building up on carpet and you don't even know. yuk.

[savannah smiles]

The house we're renting right now has all wood floors and, for me, the biggest negative is how easy they are to scratch up. I live in constant fear of dropping something or gouging it by moving a chair. We're careful and respectful of the house we're renting, but we've still managed to put several scrapes on the floors by accident. I think wood floors are very nice to look at, but when we buy our next house I'll make sure it's not all hardwood.

[amcal]

We had hardwood and it was amazing! I love it and plan to put it in our next house. We had red oak and I found them to be quite durable. But I've heard that pergo or other such laminate wood flooring is practically indestructable.

[Kristina]

I love hardwood floors. In this house we have hwf's in the bedrooms and carpet in the main living area. Though, the biggest drawback for me is that we have a big dog that sheds alot. I get tumbleweeds of doghair rolling across my hwf's! But where we do have carpet I cant get all the dog hair up with the vacuum. They can be easy to scratch, but just don't drag your furniture across them. My floors have never scratched due to dropping something on them. Actually, we are probably going to be tearing up our carpet since we do like the hardwood floors so much better, even with crawling babies! I guess it just takes a little getting used to the difference.
Oh, if you live in cold climates it can be more difficult to make your house feel warm, slippers are a must. And there can be a bit of an echo.
Pros and cons to everything.....As far keeping it clean, carpet is very dirty. There is no way you can get all the dirt out. And while hwf's take more attention to keep clean, you know that after you do clean that it is clean. There is nowhere for the dirt to hide. That alone is a big plus!

[the_lissa]

I think hardwood is way easier to keep clean than carpet. A quick sweep gets up all the cat hair; wheres, with carpets, we couldn't get all the cat hair out even with daily vacuuming. We had carpet in our old place and had quite a few stains from spills, and we moved out of there when dd was only a couple months old. As for scratches, we just put furniture pad things under all the furniture legs. We've never scratched the wood by dropping anything, so I don't know what to do about that. I will never willingly choose any other kind of flooring over hardwood again.

[Colorful~Mama]

we recently had a flood in our house (yah, dh is a plumber, dont ask) and we ripped up 2the carpet in the two back bedrooms and laid wood laminate flooring. Its almost done now but already i'm SO much happier about how much easier it is to clean. i use a swiffer/wet jet kinda gig and it picks up dog hair, dust etc.

the only negatives for me so far is that the carpeting absorbs sound and the laminate flooring doesn't. takes some getting used to the different accoustics. And my dogs nails on the flooring drives me a little batty. lol

[Book Addict Jen]

We love ours too!

[CarrieMF]

My parents have hardwood floor & stairs(probably oak, everything else in the house is oak). The stairs of water stains on them from the skylights leaking. Both the stairs & the floors(but the floors are worse) have shrunk some because they were not upkept like they should have been. On the floors this has left small gaps between the wood slats. For the first few years they used to buff and wax the wood but with 4 kids it got to be too much and they could not keep it up. There are no stains on the floors, we were never allowed to take food in the areas with wood floors for many years(though the grandchildren are).lol

They also have hardwood walls & ceilings. From what I can tell there is no shrinkage on them but they are not used like a floor/stair.

the floors are 20years old now.

There is 1 other downside. If you have other wood stuff near/on the wood floors are you are using a product like pledge you are most likely going to get it on the wood floors too and until it is rubbed off from use it because a very slippery skating rink.lol

[melissa17s]

Our house has hardwood. When we moved in, all but the kitchen had it. This past summer we replaced the yucky vinyl in the kitchen with recycled hardwood (almost 100 yrs old). The rest of the wood in our house was installed in 1892. I love the hardwood; it can last close to forever or at least more than our life span. I grew up with carpet, and I do not miss it. Even though it is getting warn in the living room, it is less work.
savannah smiles to repair scratches and dent, put a damp cloth over the area and iron. This is supposed to reconstitute the crushed grain. Then sand the area and reapply matching stain and/or sealer if the scratch broke the surface.

[wednesday]

I love wood (or tile) floors. To me carpet is just dirty. There is no way it is ever totally clean. And if something spills and stains carpet, forget it. You are looking at that stain forever.

[mirlee]

We have wood floors here. The carpet was making us ill, so we ditched it. Yes, the noise does take getting used to. When we find some we can agree on, some area rugs are in our future. This really does cut down on the noise.

I think the wood floors are easier to keep clean. I also don't worry about spills so much. I am hoping I can get a floor cleaner though. Bissell makes one that is a sweeper/wet scrubber that seems nice. I use a swiffer to pick up the dirt a couple of times a week which works quite nicely.

[momto l&a]

The only draw back I saw when we had wood floor at our old house was my oldest dd was learning to walk at the time. The sound of her head cracking when she would fall and hit her head was sickening.

We tried the socks with the little gripy things and her going barefoot but she would still slip and her head. Poor little girl couldnt even stand holding on to the coffee table without falling and cracking her head.

BTW she walked at 9 1/2 months and hasnt stopped since :LOL

Edited to add we cant wait till we have the $$ to put some type of wood floor in this house. We live in the country and our carpet is to say the least

[cornflake girl]

Thanks everyone! It seems like the consensus is positive just as I've always read here. I'm worried about them scratching or denting, too, but I guess that's really no different than carpet getting stains (which we have a ton of). The biggest challenge is working it into the budget - I want to do the whole house. If only they weren't so expensive.

[PrinceE&LsMom]

DS1 was 2.5 when we installed our floors so he missed out on all the head bonking but when he was 5 slipped and knocked his two top teeth hard and one of them died so now he has an ugly grey tooth. Luckily he was older when it happened so it should fall out soon. DS2 had to indure lots of bumped foreheads when he was learning to crawl. He didn't walk till he was 16 months so we joke that he was scared of the floors. You really have to mop every other day if you want them to stay clean (at least with my light colored ones) but I rarely get to it once every week or two : also I have to sweep 2x a day, but I do love how they look!

[Electra375]

Most new hardwood floors are sealed hardwood and they are sealed with polyurathane or an older home with sealed floors maybe varnish.

My dh and I wanted lin seed oil protected floors, but that is impossible to find these days. The floor contractor actually laughed at me when I said we didn't want poly we wanted lin seed oil.

The only draw back I have is the slickness of the urathane floors, I've slipped and fallen a few times. The kids in sox feet slip around, so they usually go barefoot on the floors and their feet are then cold. And the crawling infant pulls herself across the floor rather than up on her knees.

I think they are easier to clean than anything else, dry mop dusting, swiffer. Peepee cleans up easily for potty training and spill that happen with kids.

As for the nicks and scratch issue, we put pads on the bottom of our wooden chairs and other furniture. The toy cars and such don't seem to have done any damage.

I don't know anything about bamboo floors, sounds interesting. Stay away from parkay wood floors they are very suseptible to water damage.

[Ragana]

We love our wood floors. They are probably from the early 1930s and still going strong. It makes cat messes much easier to clean up - if we had carpets, I don't know what we'd do. We don't mop that often, but bought a used Miele (dry) vacuum that gets them pretty clean on a day-to-day basis.

I second the grippy socks, but "swiffer skating" is excellent, too!

[judybean]

We purchased our house a year ago and one of the perks (to me) was hardwood floors in the upstairs bedrooms. After living there for a few months, we discovered that under the carpet in the living and dining rooms upstairs was some GORGEOUS wood floor seemingly original to the house (50 years old). We ripped out the carpet immediately. We will need to refinish the floors because they've seen quite a bit of damage (done before we bought the house)... so now we'll have to figure out how to refinish them. I'm hoping the gorgeous golden/red shade stays!

Dd2 has experienced many spills in learning to crawl and furniture walk... In learning to crawl for a week or so she seemed to have a halo of bruises (poor little thing!), but even with that I wouldn't trade them for the world!

Now only if they had been better taken care of and we could get out the squeaking, things would be perfect!

ETA: I'm not the best housekeeper in the world (by any means!), but really, it's so easy to grab one of the microfiber towels, strap it onto the swiffer and zoom over the floor. And cleanups after spills? They're a breeze -- so much easier than with carpet!

[cornflake girl]

Now only if they had been better taken care of and we could get out the squeaking

So what causes the squeaking? Is it because they weren't taken care of, or poor installation maybe?

[melissa17s]

Squeaking can be caused by space between the boards were they don't completely lay flat together. When weight is put on the board, it squeaks when flexed. We have areas in our living room where I think there is a gap between the subfloor and the hardwood. As far as I know, squeaks come with age and not poor maintainance as long as the floors were properly installed because you can not control how the ground settles over the years. You can put a felt layer between your subfloor and your hardwood to help with noise when installing new floors.

[Ragana]

Originally Posted by melissa17s

You can put a felt layer between your subfloor and your hardwood to help with noise when installing new floors.

Do you know if there's anything that can be done once the floors are in? We have really old ones and pretty much every board creaks.