How to Decide on Hardwood or Carpet for Your Living Room

The type of flooring you have in your living room can often dictate the atmosphere of your entire home, making the choice between hardwood and carpet incredibly important! Need some help deciding? Not to worry, Flooring Liquidators has everything you need to know on choosing between the two. 

Your living room is the centrepiece of your household- it’s where you relax after a long day, entertain guests, play games, watch movies, eat dinner, and make memories. When people think “home” often the first thing they imagine is their living room, so you want to make sure you have flooring there that works for you and your family.

There’s a lot to think about, so let’s get started! You’ll want to take a number of things into consideration when choosing between carpet or hardwood for your living room. We’ve put together a list of a few critical factors to take into account:

Aesthetic

First things first, you’ll want to consider the appearance of your living room, and what kind of flooring would fit the vision you have for your home. Depending on your choices, you can give the room a very modern, sleek, professional look, or a friendly, family-oriented, comfortable style. 

While many hardwood floors can be family-friendly, quite a number of them tend to lean towards appearing more elegant, or sophisticated. If you anticipate you’ll be entertaining guests, hosting wines nights, or having work friends over, hardwood floors from Flooring Liquidators can leave a strong and lasting impression. 

Carpet on the other hand gives off an evidently warm and welcoming vibe. Its soft, lush surface can make any room feel like home, and its variety of vibrant colours can match any exotic furniture, toys, or decor you may have in the room.  

Soundproofing 

Your flooring plays a key role in how sound travels throughout your home. If you are looking to create a sense of spaciousness, grace, and impressiveness in your home, hardwood floors can often increase the amount of echo you can produce through sound. (It’s also great if you love the sound of your own voice!)

If you have a busy household, full of noisy appliances, children, or animals, you may wish to reduce the amount of echo and restrict how easily sound can move throughout the house. Carpet is an excellent way to do this, as it absorbs sound significantly better than hardwood. You can find tons of good options in our online carpet store. 

Kitchen and Food

If your living room is in close proximity to your kitchen, or you often find yourself eating in your living room, you may want to consider how easy it is to clean up food, spills, and messes from your flooring. As you might be able to guess, getting a BBQ sauce stain out of carpet is significantly harder than hardwood, as carpet is way more absorbent. Cleaning hardwood after a spill is very forgiving, as you have lots of time to get paper towel or a mop to clean up, but the moment food, wine, or anything else liquidy and colourful touches carpet, get ready to break out the steam cleaner. 

Kids

Your kids will spend a lot of time in your living room, so it’s important to consider their comfort and safety. As hardwood can be considered slippery when wet or polished, you definitely want to think about how you’ll control younger children running around the house if you have it, as they see can often see playtime as one big game of “how fast can I go before falling flat on my face”. 

Many carpet options are very forgiving for kids- if they fall over while wearing socks or shoes, the cushiony material can cushion their stumble. Many grand-sibling-slam wrestling matches have been had on living room carpets, along with many good memories. That being said, with kids come messes, and remember what we said about cleaning carpet- with certain foods it can be a challenge!

For more information on child safety in the GTA, see this article from the City of Toronto

Pets

Pets are like family to most people and should be considered when picking your living room flooring. If you plan on getting an indoor pet (such as a dog or cat), hardwood makes cleaning up after fur or accidents very smooth and easy. As much as their fur may collect in carpet, many dogs and cats actually tend to enjoy it- laying down and enjoying a nap or playing fetch in the afternoon is much more comfortable when there’s soft padding beneath you. This is even more important if you have a kid and a dog, as the two will often rile one another up as they spring mindlessly around the house.

Cost

Finally, one of the biggest factors to consider when choosing flooring for your living room is the price. Remember that you’re only covering one room, so the price differences will likely be less dramatic than if you were flooring your entire home. In most cases, hardwood floors will almost always be a bigger investment compared to carpet. The installation and material costs for hardwood are sometimes 40-120% greater for hardwood depending on the quality and look of the wood.

When choosing between carpet and hardwood flooring for your living room, be sure to take everything above into consideration before making your choice. Additionally, you should think about whether or not you will have rugs, furniture or other decor covering the floor as well, and how that will affect people’s comfort in the room. For more advice and information on flooring, you should call one of our experts at 1 (866) 473-7222.

Flooring Liquidators has a huge selection of both carpet and hardwood flooring for all of your living room needs. Contact us today to find out how you can give your living room its best look for amazing prices.