After years of hands-on home renovations, including transitions from old tiles to wood and polished concrete floors, we're now selecting a new floor for our current home. Drawing from this expertise, I'll guide you through key considerations for a durable, practical choice.
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Our experience spans multiple flooring types across homes: from outdated tiles to hardwood, and later to a polished concrete overlay after a leak. This real-world testing informs our current decisions for the living room, dining area, kitchen, and hallway, where we're replacing slate.
With renovations underway—including wall demolitions and new doors—holes in the existing floor necessitate a full replacement. Here's how we evaluated options, leading to a reliable choice from Ambiant Floors.
The following priorities shaped our decision, ensuring suitability for family life.
Top priority: a floor resilient to pets (one dog, three cats), teenagers, and frequent guests. It must withstand daily wear, spills, and paw prints while being simple to clean via mopping.
We also host parties and celebrations regularly, ruling out carpets or unsealable wood that can't handle moisture or traffic.
We're drawn to the modern concrete aesthetic, as seen in our concrete-look dining table and prior polished floor. However, real concrete is scratch-prone—especially with rural sand tracking indoors—so we sought scratch-resistant alternatives.
Herringbone patterns appealed for warmth, but concrete-look proved more practical: versatile for styling and hides dirt better.
Laminate suits bedrooms but clicks noisily underfoot, amplified by pet nails. PVC offers quieter walking, making it ideal for main living areas. We prefer click PVC over glued for future removability during planned extensions.
Options like residential concrete or tiles were dismissed to avoid damage and enable reuse.
Our subfloor features underfloor heating, requiring a floor with excellent thermal conductivity.
Summary of criteria:
After thorough research, we selected a click PVC floor from the vtwonen collection by Ambiant Floors—featuring unique concrete-look patterns. We compared variants and chose the most forgiving for stains.
Using Ambiant Floors' room planner and requesting samples confirmed our decision.
The planner helped test herringbone versus concrete-look in our space—hubby vetoed herringbone, solidifying concrete. Upload your room photo to preview options realistically.
Examples:
The shown concrete-look illustrates our style.
We also visualized our chill area:
