Carpet or hard surface flooring – which is really best?
The answer might surprise you
Many homeowners are learning how expensive shortsightedness can be. However, many others
still don’t know the whole story: For roughly 10 years, the popularity of hard-surface floors were
abounding as carpet sales dropped. However, for the last three years, carpet sales have been on the
rise again. Why the turnaround?
The two primary reasons many people went to hard surfaces were …
1) Ease of maintenance. Sweep it, mop it, and forget it … so they thought. And with hard
surfaces, they no longer had to endure the ugly, dirty pathways.
2) Once hard surfaces were installed, they no longer had to be concerned with replacing them, at
least not for a very long time.
So, the additional expense seemed worth it. However, once they had spent far more money
buying brick, Mexican tile, hardwood and other hard surface types, many people found that their
insights were not all that insightful: They discovered that …
- Hard surface floors accumulate soils just like carpeting. They found that many hard surface types were just as difficult to clean, … that simply mopping the floors didn’t remove the ugly dirt that had collected in designer crevices and grout.
- They had a noise pollution problem in their homes. Quieter, previously-carpeted rooms suddenly became nosier because hard surfaces didn’t absorb sound.
- The likelihood of physical injuries from falls was greater, having no carpet and pad, no softness under foot, to fall upon. And they found that there were more falls from coming indoors with damp shoe leather on rainy days. Children and the elderly were injured most commonly.
- They were right. There were no excessively soiled pathways. Now the shoe soils were distributed equally all over the house.
- Indoor air quality had dropped, and allergy problems increased. Air currents created by foot traffic and air conditioning systems stirred settled dust back into the air, while carpeting did a better job of holding it in place. They found that they couldn’t sweep their hard surfaces but had to mop, because sweeping stirred dust into the air.
- While their hard surfaces endured longer, people found that they were also getting bored with the same décor. Yes, they could buy new furniture and drapes. But these new furnishing somehow didn’t look all that new, sitting on older floors they were tired of looking at but had spent thousands more to install.
It appears that carpeting offers far more advantages than hard surfaces, which explains the increase in carpet sales. Still, it’s also obvious that—hard or soft—there is no final solution to the floor-maintenance problem. We must accept the fact that—whatever covers the floor—it has to be cleaned and should be properly. Further, proper maintenance is no job for a ‘handyman.’ It requires knowledge, expertise, and caring. We have the knowledge. We have the expertise. And we care a bunch! Pleasing you is our objective.
We want to serve your on-going maintenance needs and do so according to your wishes. But, to do so, we need your help: As we serve you, tell us what you want. Explain your concerns. Point out your problems. Don’t take the chance that anything will be overlooked, because …
Pleasing you is important to us. Let us know when we succeed. And let us know when we fail. Teach us how to be your ‘good servant.’
