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Posted: Sep 6, 2011
If you have kids, they're finally back in school. But that also means they're busy with activities, sports, and hanging out with friends. What that means for you is less time to take care of the house and fewer recruits for cleaning.
We thought we'd share an article that we found about taking a little bit of time each day to keep your home in tip-top shape. How to Keep Your Home Organized Daily
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Cleaning Articles | Cleaning Tips
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Posted: Jul 27, 2010
So you've decided to take out the ugly green shag carpet from the living room or the worn out linoleum in the kitchen that's from the 1980's. What type of flooring should you put in? Since we deal with all sorts of floor types, we decided to share our thoughts about what to consider when choosing to install a new floor covering.
When deciding on the type of floor to install, there really is one question you should ask yourself. What do I want to accomplish with my flooring? You may be thinking, what? Let us explain with more in-depth questions that will help answer this question.
- What kind of look do you want for the room?
- What kind of feel do you want the room to have?
- What is the main purpose of the room?
- What is the main purpose of the flooring in that room?
- How durable does the floor need to be?
- What is your personal preference? (This is usually the most important.)
When considering these questions we thought it best to choose two rooms to consider, the kitchen and the living room. The kitchen and living room usually have different purposes and so that means keeping those different purposes in mind when choosing a type of flooring. Also, the options for covering the floor that we have limited ourselves to are carpet, hardwood, and tile & grout. There are a few other types of floors that we could talk about, but these are the most common types used in a home.
First, let's start in the kitchen. In some older homes you actually may be taking out carpet from the kitchen. There are good reasons that most kitchens don't have carpet. When in the kitchen, carpets are hard to keep clean, hard to get the grease from food out of, and hard to sanitize. One of the few reasons for having carpet in the kitchen is so that the floor is warmer then a wood floor or a tile & grout floor.
Although carpet is warmer than hardwood floors, for a kitchen a wood floor has lots of advantages. First, the rich colors of hardwood will make a room feel more inviting than tile. If the floor was installed with a coat of polyurethane (most hardwood floors are), then it will hold up to daily wear relatively well and be easy to clean. However, if moisture is allowed to stand in one place over a long period of time, the wood floor will begin to warp or buckle and the water will actually stain the floor. What this means, is just be careful to clean up spills quickly and make sure there is not water accumulating around windows, doors, or refrigerators. When compared with tile & grout, hardwood requires a little more maintenance.
Tile & grout, however, is more durable than both a wood floor and carpet. When your kids spill or drop something on the floor there is less of a chance of permanent damage. If the grout between the tiles is sealed with a grout sealer yearly, then it's easier to clean as well. One thing to consider, too, when deciding on flooring for your kitchen is if there is an entrance from the outside into the kitchen. Tile & grout will stand up to the dirt and sand that will be tracked inside from everyone's shoes better then hardwood. That's why having a rug outside and inside the door is always a good idea to catch as much dirt as possible.
So you've decided what kind of floor to put in the kitchen, what about the living room? Now there are very few homes that have tile & grout in the living room, except for as a section of the entry way. This helps as a place to take off shoes to prevent the moisture from snow or rain, salt from the road, dirt, and other debris from being brought further into your home.
Usually the types of flooring in a living room are either carpet or wood floors. Having carpet in the living room will make the floor warmer, softer, quieter when walking on and actually absorbs a lot of noise. One thing that carpet also helps with is keeping the air in your home cleaner. The dust in your home will settle into the carpet and then it gets trapped, unlike wood floors where the dust will just continue to blow around the room. Keep in mind however, that with carpet, the furniture will need to be rearranged periodically in order to change the paths that your family uses to move around in the room. Doing this prevents traffic lanes from appearing, which are caused by walking over the same area of carpet over and over.
With a hardwood floor there is no need to rearrange the furniture, unless you feel like it. Although, when you do move your furniture around you'll have to be careful not to scratch the floor. A hardwood floor, even though it may not be as warm on your feet, does create more of a richer feel in a room than carpet and can always be accented with different types of rugs. It also holds up better to spills and is easier to clean up then carpet.
We've talked a lot about the benefits and drawbacks of the different types of flooring you can have in your kitchen and living room, but in the end it all comes down to what you want to accomplish with the room. How do you want the room to feel, to look? What is the purpose of the floor, of the room? How durable does the floor need to be? But the biggest point to consider when choosing a floor covering is what you personally prefer (if it's the husband deciding then it usually means what his wife prefers).
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Cleaning Articles | Cleaning Tips
