are carpets a no go with children? Post Reply

[coffeepot]

We are mid way through a house renovation and starting to do more of the fun interior bits. I want to have wooden floors throughout the ground floor but my husband really wants carpets in the living room areas? Would love to hear from anyone with carpets how hard they are to keep clean, how often you get them cleaned etc. I have 2 children under 9. Thanks.

[D&LBalham]

We’ve found rugs are the way to go. Hard floors are easier to clean, but when babies turn into toddlers there are far fewer slips and falls when there’s a soft floor - plus falls hurt less.

My preference is a big (near room-filling) rug with a mat down for messy activities like feeds and changes

Hope that helps a little!

[SamanthaB]

My two have allergies so hard floors make them worse plus they need constant sweeping & mopping etc. We have a large rug in kitchen/diner but carpeting elsewhere. As long as you have someone that can always get spills out, then you will be fine and our guy uses eco friendly stuff for allergies but leaves us one of his spotter bottles after each annual visit.
I do agree with previous post on hard floor falls, our only severe injury, was when the rug was missed by about three feet 

[Sarah1991]

Hi coffee pot. I to have two children under 9 also. Having recently moved home and renovated the new house I am in I decided to go with wooden floors with a big rug over the living room floor. In my old home I had carpets down and let's just say I was constantly scrubbing them. And stains didn't always come up. So I have decided to leave it until the kids are grown to ever consider carpets again.
Goodluck with rest of the renovation. I know it can be stressful but also a lot of fun.
All the best
Sarah.

[mymyherewegoagain]

Hello. Whatever dirt has to come off a hard floor has to come off the carpet too - the carpet might just make it less visible. You do get very hard-wearing stain resistant carpet. I accidentally spilled a bottle of bleach down our stairs and amazingly nothing happened to the carpet - it predates us moving in so I don’t know the details of what/where unfortunately. I have a seven year old and carpet mess issues seem to have abated (famous last words). Either way, get yourself a Eufy robovac - it’ll keep your carpets and hard flooring clean.

[SouthLondonDaddy]

Carpets cannot be cleaned well without professional equipment; even if you vacuum carpets twice a week, when you have it cleaned professionally with one of those gigantic machines you will still notice a huge difference.
Ever tried cleaning poo, wee, coffee, milk, vomit, fruit juices etc from carpets? Not fun.

None of these problems applies to hardwood or tiles.

How do hard floors make allergies worse? Carpets tend to trap dust, but the dust is still there. It may fly around less but it's still there. The allergy sufferers I know have always told me that's why carpets make their allergies worse. Maybe there are other allergies where you suffer if dust flies around, but not if it is trapped on a carpet? I genuinely do not know.

I love wood but it's impractical because it gets scratched easily, especially with kids, and many wood types may discolour with sunlight. Plus it's noisy.

I also like tiles very much; many people dislike them because they find them cold, but I don't mind - plus tiles with underfloor heating work very well.

[dudette]

Hard floors are much easier to clean so they are much better for allergy sufferers. I'm not quite sure what Samantha was talking about. I wouldn't recommend tiles with young children as they are extremely hard and they look awful too (except in the kitchen and hallway). Wooden floors have more give in them so although they're not as soft as carpets they don't hurt so much if you fall on them. Personally I hate carpets. We have some in our house and I wish we had just had the whole thing done in wood. 

[SouthLondonDaddy]

I don't find tiles awful at all, I actually find them quite elegant, but of course it's subjective. Something like these can be quite nice (this specific brand is very expensive but there is better value for money)

https://www.porcelanosa.com/uk/tiles/fl ... gIQDvD_BwE

Of course falling on these hurts more than falling on wood - you can't have it all!

My issue with wood is that I have never had wood last more than 3ish years - after that, it either gets scratched badly, or discolours from sunlight and looks awful.

[firsttimerSW11]

We had a house with wooden floors throughout. We then moved and put carpets in the upper flowers. Mainly because the house is much colder without carpets.

Having done both, and we are going to move again soon, I think we will go with wooden floors - I think they are nicer from an aesthetic point of view - but will ensure we have better heating throughout.

[SamanthaB]

For SouthLondonDaddy, airborne allergies are trapped within carpet but can become airborne again, on hard floors with any draft from open windows/doors. Carpets were first used in UK, for trapping & filtering, of fumes from gas lamps. Like a washing machine, regular cleaning of the filter, stops machine from failing but if left to fill up !!
We really read up about allergies, when our second child was born with asthma and there was a test in Sweden and where they removed carpeting from all public buildings, allergy complaints increased by 600%.
We have large rugs on hard floors downstairs but carpeting upstairs, we do have some easy clean rugs in children's bedrooms though.

[SouthLondonDaddy]

Out of curiosity, a quick pubmed (the 'search engine' of scientific publications) brings up this Norwegian study
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29360764

"We have not found updated peer reviewed evidence that carpeted floor is unproblematic for the indoor environment. On the contrary, also more recent data support that carpets may act as a repository for pollutants which may become resuspended upon activity in the carpeted area. [...] 

I also note that a conference paper was presented a few years ago, which concluded that
" Intensive carpet cleaning can be highly effective in reducing both surface allergen and airborne particle counts"
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... th_Carpets
The operative word being intensive - if you read the abstract it talks about hot water extraction, which requires bulky, expensive professional machines. We have it done about twice a year but I don't know anyone who owns one of these machines.

As for the Swedish study, is that the one which simply compared the occurrences of allergies in the '70s vs the '90s, and noted that in the 90s there were fewer carpets but more allergy sufferers? That is not exactly a like-for-like comparison! All kinds of allergies have increased over the last decades, and no one really knows why, it could be any combination of environmental factors, different lifestyles, different reporting (maybe these things were underreported in the past).
To make a comparison, you can't just say: we eat more avocados now than our parents did 20 years ago, we suffer more from X, so avocados contribute to X!!!

[coffeepot]

Thanks so much to everyone for your replies. Having pondered I think that we will go for carpets throughout and save the carpets for a different stage in our lives! Thanks again for taking time to reply.

[Chucka2468]

I would always get wall to wall carpets. Children use the floor a lot and carpet is warmer and comfortable in our colder climate. We clean using hired dirt devil machine from Tesco or hire shops once a year or less.