Figuring out how to style your floors is one of the most challenging parts of the home designing and decorating your home. You can easily change the color of your walls or add lovely decorations in your house, but when it comes to flooring, it can be a challenging and expensive project.
Nowadays, plenty of flooring options can be easily installed, transforming your home into a modern one. However, when you decide to renovate your home floor, you have to be careful and make the right decision, since the floor contributes to the home décor. We all know that there is no ideal flooring option for every room, different materials have different advantages and disadvantages, and it depends on the person’s taste. Therefore, you can choose other flooring options for your home, such as Laminate, Vinyl, Linoleum, Hardwood, LVT, and Bamboo. These are all affordable, beautiful, and modern flooring options for your home.
However, before you start with changing your floor, you have to do a bit of research to find suitable flooring material that matches both your style and your budget.
What to Look for When Choosing Flooring
By choosing the perfect flooring, you may create your home design aesthetic and offer convenience, comfort, and smoothness, as well as durable, stain- and fade-resistant. To make up your mind for the best flooring material, you have to decide what you need. Several factors to help you decide which type of flooring you need are:
- Room Type: depending on the room, many of the flooring materials are unsuitable for specific room spaces.
- Budget: prices differ from material to material, so you should choose the best one for your budget.
- Installation process and requirements: some flooring materials require extra underlayment or a long installation process.
So, let us check out these inexpensive and attractive flooring alternatives for every room to make it seem stylish and comfortable.
Types of Flooring Materials
There are varieties of uses for the six flooring materials that we have selected for you. With their classic looks and warm qualities, each of them will give your space a pleasing aesthetic impression. Here is a handy guide to help you decide on the ideal flooring material for your lovely room.
1. Laminate
Many years ago, laminate flooring was introduced to the home flooring market as an appealing and affordable alternative to natural hardwood flooring. Like engineered wood, it is built with a thin veneer atop a plywood or compressed fiber. A translucent plastic covering protects an image on top of the wood, but the top layer is not wood. In other words, a laminate can appear like wood, stone, or tile, depending on the design. Laminate is available as planks and tiles. You may install most of them over your existing flooring without using glue or nails.
| Pros | Cons |
| Easy DIY installation | Cannot be refinished |
| On-budget | Non moisture-proof |
| Extreme resilience | Hard and noisy underfoot. |
| Beautiful appearance |
The laminate cost can be less than $1 per square foot and is rarely more than $2 per square foot. If you do not want to do it yourself, the cost per square foot ranges from $3 to $10.
2. Vinyl
Homes with vinyl floors, particularly in the kitchen and bathroom, are becoming increasingly popular among house buyers. In addition to being water and stain resistant, vinyl flooring is flexible and offers exceptional value for money. Moreover, vinyl flooring nowadays is beautiful and cost-effective, thanks to various technological advancements over the years.
There are two types of vinyl flooring:
- Sheet flooring: the flooring material is laid down in sheets 6 or 12 feet wide
- Tile flooring: the flooring material is placed down in tiles 9″x9″ or 12″x12.”
As a result, many homeowners prefer vinyl tile instead of sheet flooring since it is more water-resistant and easier to install.
| Pros | Cons |
| Moisture resistant | Difficult to remove |
| Durable | Not eco-friendly |
| Easy DIY Installation | Short lifespan |
| Low maintenance |
In terms of price per square foot, vinyl ranges from $0.05 to $5. Vinyl planks and tiles are evaluated at $3.44 per square foot. An additional $3 to $10 per foot is required for installation, bringing the total to between $3 and $10 per foot.
3. Linoleum
We perceive linoleum as a relic of a past era, but it is rapidly gaining popularity as a long-lasting, environmentally friendly flooring option. Because of current manufacturing techniques, linoleum flooring is available in a broad selection of colors and styles, making it a popular choice among professional and DIY designers. In addition, linoleum gives off a little cushioning effect because it compresses and bounces back when it is trodden on.
Cork powder (which gives the linoleum its bounce and durability) and pine resins, and wood flour are among the natural, renewable ingredients for its production. In addition, limestone dust improves hardness and durability. Linoleum flooring has a wide selection of colors and patterns thanks to pigment dyes. Linoleum is also available as sheets, tiles, or laminated planks that may be used as a floating floor, just like vinyl flooring.
| Pros | Cons |
| Soft and flexible | Scratches and moisture damage |
| Low maintenance | Regular buffing and polishing |
| Renewable and biodegradable | Sunlight damage |
| Different colors | Slippery |
| Durable and versatile |
When it comes to the cost, linoleum is a little more costly than vinyl, starting at $2 to $5 per square foot when it comes to the cost. However, the cost of professional installation is similar to the vinyl.
4. Hardwood
On the quest for the perfect home, we can all admit that hardwood flooring is a must-have feature to have. It improves the house’s value and is often a deciding factor in the purchasing choice for many people. As a result of the natural beauty of wood and its warmth, we long to live in a home with hardwood floors in it. These floors have an impression of sophistication and elegance, which is why people draw towards them. Different sorts of flooring materials are now available that may rival the grandeur of timber flooring. On the other hand, wood lends a feeling of richness and elegance to your home by improving the entire ambiance.
There are two types of solid wood flooring: 1.5 to 2.5-inch broad strips and 4 to 8 inch long planks. In addition to oak and maple, exotic woods like Brazilian cherry or Purple Heart can also make it. The hardwood installation is maybe one of the easiest; 0.5 to 0.75-inch-thick hardwood boards or planks are installed by nailing them to a wooden subfloor.
| Pros | Cons |
| Long-term investment | Expensive |
| Variety | Termite attack |
| Easy maintenance and clean | Scratching |
| Different types | Moisture damage |
| Organic | Limited usage |
| Easy DIY installation | Noise |
The cost of wood flooring can range from $3 to $14 per square foot, depending on the wood type. Expect to pay an average of $8,000 for 1,000 square feet of wood flooring if you hire a professional.
5. LVT
Luxury Vinyl Tiles are the perfect match for commercial and industrial designers, as they are go-to flooring. LVT has become a popular replacement for tiled and hardwood floors with its ability to recreate patterns in minute detail. In addition, LVT offers a cost-effective alternative to wood flooring by displaying the wood’s character, appearance, and grain or the texture and feel of Italian slate tiles.
There are three types of LVT, such as Stick down, Locking System, and Looselay. All three are constructed of PVC, which makes them highly robust and long-lasting. Due to their robust surfaces and waterproof properties, they are ideal for every room.
| Pros | Cons |
| Resistant | Requires a flawless substrate |
| Easy DIY installation | Sunlight damage |
| Affordable | |
| Appearance |
It is possible to install luxury vinyl tile for as little as $1/sqft and as much as $3/sqft. The sort of luxury vinyl tile you buy and your unique market will determine your installation expenses in the end.
6. Bamboo
Bamboo is a fast-growing grass that looks and feels like hardwood. In recent years, it has gained popularity as an eco-friendly alternative to wood flooring. As a flooring material, bamboo shares almost the same benefits and downsides as hardwood flooring. Bamboo flooring is prefinished and features tongue-and-groove joints, just like solid wood flooring. In comparison, it takes 120 years for old-growth hardwoods to reach perfection, whereas bamboo takes three to five years.
Several varieties of bamboo flooring are available, each with its unique production method, such as:
- Stranded bamboo: made by shredding and compressing bamboo stalks into sheets using heat and resin binders and then cutting the sheets into planks.
- Horizontal bamboo flooring: made by cutting strands into thin strips and glued together to make planks.
- Engineered bamboo flooring: made by bonding a thin layer of bamboo on plywood or MDF core.
| Pros | Cons |
| Renewable material | Easily scratched |
| Easy maintenance | Cracks |
| Can be refinished | Contains Formaldehyde Adhesive |
| Adds value to the real estate | |
| Eco-friendly |
Bamboo flooring starts at around $1.50 per square foot and goes up to $2.50 per square foot. In most cases, the cost of installation is an additional $4 per square foot.
This concludes this our blog entry. We hope that finding the appropriate flooring material for your house is now easier for you.
Thank you for reading! We hope you were inspired to kick-start some exciting new projects in 2021.
If you need help with any of these projects, Cransten can help you with all of these! Of course, any others we did not mention in this article, thus, do not hesitate to contact us for a free consultation. We will be more than happy to help.