Make life easier with wooden flooring

We’re always looking to make life easier for ourselves by reducing the amount of cleaning and the number of chores that need to be carried out at home. In our hectic lifestyles, any time we get off work we’d much rather spend relaxing at home than having to scrub the floor on our hands and knees. That’s what you’ll often find yourself doing if you have a carpet, trying unsuccessfully to get rid of a stain. But with wood flooring, you’ll find that you can put your feet up.

The weekly clean is one that not many of us look forward to, but is necessary to keep your house looking spick and span. Dusting is easy enough, but when it comes to vacuum cleaning you’ll find it quite tough if your floor is carpeted. Over time dirt becomes ingrained in your carpet and a really vigorous vacuum is often needed just to get your floor looking relatively acceptable. You can never get your carpet looking as good as new and regular hoovering will soon leave your carpet looking old and tired.

This is something you won’t find with wooden flooring. A wood floor stands up to the rigours of everyday life much better and is ideal to fit in houses in the 21st century. The material is easy to clean, with just a quick wipe of the surface needed, and thus hardly any maintenance is required. Stains won’t show once you’ve wiped them away and a wooden floor can look as good as new for years after you’ve had it installed. So you won’t have to worry about spilling that glass of red wine and can just relax and enjoy living in your home.

Being safe in the knowledge that you can easily clean your floor even if an accident were to happen means that you don’t have to worry about being ultra cautious when you’re drinking or eating messy food in your house. You won’t constantly be anxious about a spillage occurring, so if you do invite some of your friends around for a catch up you can fully concentrate on enjoying yourself and worry about cleaning up in the morning. Whereas if you were to spill something on the carpet and you didn’t notice it right away, it would be likely that when you tended to it in the morning it would be too late.

The popularity of wood floors is growing, due to the minimal maintenance they require. What's more, carpet is quickly becoming a material of the past. While carpet used to be prevalent in homes across the UK and wooden flooring was fairly rare, this trend is now starting to reverse. More and more people are ripping up their old carpet and replacing it with wood flooring, while many new houses are now being installed with wooden flooring as this is what a lot of people are after.

If you’re planning to move house then the flooring is one thing for you to consider. When you’re looking at different properties it is well worth taking the flooring situation into account, as if wooden flooring isn’t installed it might be something you look to have rectified in the future and thus should be included in your budget. If it has been laid throughout the house then you can leave the floors as they are and concentrate on other areas of the house you’d like to improve.

You also have to take these things into account when you’re selling your current house, as it’s something that prospective buyers will be looking at. If you haven’t got wooden flooring installed already then it might be worth doing before putting your house on the market as it will make a lot of buyers happy. When trying to make your house look its best you’ll find that however hard you clean the carpet it still won’t look great if it’s quite a few years old, so the first impressions of prospective buyers might not be what you were after.

By having wood flooring installed throughout the house you can also make your home much more uniform. Instead of having a mismatch of different colours and styles of carpet, in addition to lino in the kitchen and utility room, you can have wooden flooring in every room in your house. This is possible due to its ease of cleaning, compared to carpet which just isn’t practical in the kitchen, and will help to make your home look smarter.

As well as being easy to maintain, wooden flooring can also help to make any room in the house much lighter. If you struggle to get light into your rooms and have to use artificial light to keep them bright then wood flooring will be a pleasant change. The material reflects natural light much better than carpet. As a result your rooms will be brighter throughout the day, and natural light streaming through the window will help to improve your mood too, compared to a dull and dark house.

How light you want a room to be is completely up to you and is dependent on the colour of wood flooring that you choose. The lighter colours of wooden flooring, such as alder and ash, for example, will really help to make a room lighter and even appear more spacious. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a warm and cosy room that’s ideal to snuggle up in during the winter, then a darker colour such as smoked oak will help you to achieve that.

The colour of flooring that you choose for a specific room in the house will of course depend on the features that you have in that room and the colour of the walls. You can head online and recreate your room, then see what certain colours of floor would look like and whether they fit in perfectly. This floor visualiser can help you to mock up a room and choose the colour of flooring that you think is perfect.