After seven years with big dogs on our oak floors, we are having them refinished. Instead of polyurethane, we are going with a penetrating oil finish that can be refinished in the future in just the areas needing refinishing, rather than requiring that the whole floor be done at once.
@oneofthosemoms …thanks, this is what I’m afraid of. We don’t have vaulted ceilings though, just normal 8 '. Plus, I have hearing issues where things sound more hollow. I really want an updated look, but am hesitant due to this.
We have hardwood floors throughout the house and we also have large windows. The result is a lot of sound-reflective surfaces. DH and I both wanted the hardwood, however, so we attenuated the sound reflections by putting up sound-absorbing panels (something like these http://www.homedepot.com/p/Auralex-2-ft-W-x-2-ft-L-x-2-in-H-Studio-Foam-Wedge-Panels-Charcoal-Half-Pack-12-Panels-per-Box-2SF22CHA-HP/203468284, but covered with fabric) and fabric wall hangings (quilts) as decoration. It takes a little experimentation to determine where the sound is being reflected, but once you do, you can immediately hear the difference. (Here’s some theory for you: http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/sound/Lesson-3/Reflection,-Refraction,-and-Diffraction)
@conmama, with those regular height ceilings you might be fine. Especially if you have a home with curtains/drapes and lots of upholstered items to absorb sound. Along with our vaulted ceilings we also have shutters on every window, lots of bookshelves, etc. Hard stuff everywhere. If you have a sort of spare, mid-century look that will exacerbate the issue. If your look leans more shabby chic, you’ll be better off.
We have laminate that looks like wood. So easy to clean and sweep and I like the look. It’s way cheaper, too!
Our FR has heavy drapes which will stay and we will be getting new furniture which will be fabric. I do plan on putting a 15" x 9" thick rug with padding in front of the sofa. It still makes me nervous. I wish carpet was the thing to have!
@dmd77 …where do you hang those in your rooms? Very creative!
Are you planning to sell this house soon? If not, why not just get what you like? You can still get carpet or whatever but get something more “updated” not bright orange shag carpeting a la Brady Bunch! Maybe look to other features in the room to “modernize” it? Maybe choose more contemporary furniture colors or get rid of the heavy drapes or replace a brass fireplace surround - stuff like that. But get the flooring YOU like!
I have 8 ft ceilings and only an area rug in the living room and family room now. I had one in the master and the dining room but since I got my floors refinished and they look so beautiful I haven’t put those two back down. I have no drapes anywhere - just a swag in living room huge bay window; nothing on the windows in family room and roman shades in the bedrooms. I have no problem with sound reflections/echos at all.
I can’t imagine being nervous about putting hardwood floors down…
I have area rugs…but I have no curtains at all on my first floor…none. Regular height ceilings. Lots of windows. No echoes at all.
We have hardwood throughout. We used to have a rug in the living room but took it up when we had the floors redone and never put it back down. I do have window treatments because I love fabric. No echoing at all but it’s a small house with regular height ceilings.
We have no issues with noise or echoes with our whiteout throughout the house. We have bathmat-sized throw rugs and nothing else to absorb/dampen sound or echos.
Maybe echoes is the wrong word, Hollow. It’s a hard word to describe, but even DH feels a difference. It’s a physical sensation rather than hearing an echo even in silence. From what it sounds like the 8" ceiling make a difference.
Our ceiling is only slightly like wet than 8’ from the floor. We really love wood and have not noticed excessive noise. We have loved the floor since we had it installed over 24 years ago and can’t imagine anything as nice.
This is hard for me. We presently have carpet in our house and love the warm feeling it has. Our previous house had hardwoods and it had that hollow feeling as you say @conmama. We didn’t like them. It was an old house and besides the noise, they scratched very easily. They were great for my allergies though.
Now we live in a newer house and tons of my neighbor’s and my sil have wood floors in similar aged homes. The new pre-finished wood is nice. My sil’s are used hard and are still in great shape and warm feeling. A very different feeling from my previous home.
A couple of things keep us back from installing them in our house (besides the price lol!). My neighbor’s, who I admit are mostly pretty fussy, feel they have to keep the windows closed all year round to keep the humidity at a perfect level. They have humidifiers in the winter and the air on constantly in the summer. It would kill me to feel that I couldn’t open the windows. I hate that.
Sometimes I think HGTV has ruined things and trends such as everyone has to like hardwood floors.
My S and fiancé just bought a new house and didn’t seem to concerned about the fact that it has carpet. In fact they are planning on replacing the carpet in 2 rooms. Unfortunately the previous owners had a cat and my allergies went crazy, it is almost impossible to get cat hair out of carpet.
We’ve had extensive hardwood in every single house we’ve owned. My conclusion is that it isn’t so much what the floors are made of that determines the noise level, but the walls. Three of our four houses were antiques, with thick plaster walls. They were very quiet. The fourth house was a modern Texas house, with drywall and a lot of hollow doors. It was very noisy, but putting throw rugs everywhere helped. We chose patterns that didn’t show dirt as much because the children were very small then, and spills were a fact of life.
Hardwood floors are much easier to clean (and they really get clean, unlike carpet, which just filters the dust down to the sub-floor), but they also show dust a lot sooner. I have two cats and if I really want the floors to be clean, I have to swiffer several times a week and vacuum at least once a week.
For those of you with hollow/echo sounds, are you wearing hard shoes walking around? I’m always out of my street shoes and have not experienced that hollow sound with hardwood floors.
Are you “pounders”? That is, people who just have a heavy step?
At my old house, socks, shoes, bare feet, didn’t matter. That house creaked and groaned. It’s not the floors, but the whole house sound.
My home is all hardwood except for the laundry room and the master bathroom (tile). Even the kitchen is hardwood.
It’s about 10 years old, and except for some fading on the dark espresso stain from the very large western facing windows, the floors are still in really good shape. We have dogs and kids. I “wax” the floors using Orange Glo after cleaning them with a Shark Steam mop. The steam does not hurt the floors. Neither does varying humidity (we get big swings in georgia).
We don’t ever wear shoes in the house. I personally think shoes on wood floors are the #1 reason they get destroyed. My inlaw’s house has wood floors that are destroyed-all the urethane finish has been completely ground off because they wear their shoes in the house all the time, and they had their floors put in at about the same time my house was built.
As for acoustics-we have one large area rug in the family room, and I have some very long curtains in the family room and the kitchen. We don’t seem to have a problem with echoing or “hollow” sounding areas, but we have 10 foot ceilings (not vaulted), so the sound may just behave differently. We also have a lot of large live plants (like palms and bananas), and they really absorb sound waves. They’re up on wheels so there’s no contact with the pot and the hardwood.
We don’t have area rugs at the entrance on the wood floors-they tend to act as sandpaper, trapping dirt and sanding off the finish every time you walk on it. We take off our shoes in the garage, and we have mats in the garage and outside on the front door entrance.
We have had laminate in the past, and if you have a problem with sound, you’ll hate laminate. It squeaks and crunches when you walk on it, the dogs’ toenails make a constant clicky clack noise on it, and it is harder than hardwood (it feels and looks like formica to me), so sounds really bounce. Plus it chips. I can’t tell you how aggravating it is to have the laminate chip and be able to see the bright green pressboard underneath (I’m talking to you, Pergo!). We have it in the basement (we didn’t do it), and I want to remove it and switch to the wood-look tile that is out now.
Some of that tile is gorgeous. I designed a master bath for MIL with silver gray hardwood-look porcelain tile on the floor running the length of the room unbroken through the walk in shower, and it’s stunning. It also has a slight texture so there’s less worry of them slipping. Good stuff.
^Your inlaws hardwood isn’t destroyed, it just needs to be refinished.
My floors are 60 years old and I just got them refinished for the first time since we moved here 26 years ago (there was hideous green and orange shag carpeting over them when we first moved in that we ripped up immediately.) After 26 years there was no finish on them at all and they looked like crap. I wish I had done them years before but the thought of moving everything out of the house kept stopping me.
We have dogs and it’s impossible to keep grit and dirt from coming in on their paws and I don’t have a no shoes rule. I swiffer every day to get up the dust and my shark vacuum has a swiffer attachment that I use about once a week. I Bona just the family room and kitchen ( an addition so those floors only 8 years old) every few weeks as that is where we live in our house and where the dogs come in from the back yard, but not the other rooms.