Flooring by Room:
The Honest
Fit Guide

Colour is the decision people arrive with and it is almost never the one that determines whether they are happy in five years. Rooms have jobs. A kitchen deals with water and dropped things. A bedroom deals with bare feet. A basement deals with a concrete slab. Match the material to the job first and the colour choice afterwards is genuinely enjoyable rather than fraught. Call 636-332-0654.

Four questions that settle most rooms

Before looking at a single sample it is worth answering four things about the room in question, because between them they eliminate most of the catalogue and leave you choosing between options that would all actually work.

• How much water does this room see, and is it spills that get wiped or standing water that sits.
• How much traffic crosses it, and does that traffic follow one line or spread out.
• Does anyone stand still in it for long, or walk it barefoot, or sit on the floor in it.
• Is it above grade, or is it sitting on a concrete slab.

That last one carries more weight than most people expect. A slab passes moisture upward as vapour even when the room has never had water in it and the floor is dry to the touch. It is the single most common reason a below-grade floor disappoints somebody, and it has nothing to do with the product they picked.

Water is the first filter

Water sorts the categories faster than anything else. Kitchens, bathrooms, laundry rooms, mudrooms and entries need a surface that does not care about moisture, which in practice means tile, luxury vinyl plank or sheet vinyl. That is not a limitation, because those three between them cover an enormous range of looks.

The distinction worth understanding is between water resistant and waterproof, because the marketing language treats them as interchangeable and they are not. Water resistant handles a spill that gets wiped up in reasonable time, which covers ordinary daily life. Waterproof is a different claim about standing water. Ask us which a specific product is and we will tell you plainly instead of reading you the box.

Comfort and quiet are the second

Rooms you are barefoot in, sit on the floor in, or want quiet in have a different brief, and this is where carpet keeps winning despite years of being written off. Bedrooms are the obvious case. A two storey house is the less obvious one: hard surfaces upstairs transmit sound down through the structure in a way that surprises people who have only ever considered how a floor looks.

Stairs deserve a decision of their own rather than inheriting whatever the bedrooms got. They take the most concentrated wear of any surface in a house, and grip matters on them in a way it does not on a flat floor.

The rooms where we talk people out of their first choice

It happens most often with solid wood. People want hardwood in a finished basement, and we tell them the slab makes that a poor bet and point them at engineered hardwood or vinyl instead. It happens with wood in full bathrooms for the same reason. It happens in reverse too, when somebody has decided vinyl is the only sensible option and what they actually want, in a dry busy main level, is laminate, which is harder to scratch and feels more solid underfoot.

We would rather lose a sale than sell a floor into a room that will disappoint you, because the second conversation is much worse than the first. Getting it right the first time is the whole point.

One material or several

Whether a house wants one floor throughout or several depends on how it is built rather than on taste. An open main level with no doorway between kitchen, dining and living space has nowhere natural to change material, so one floor usually has to carry all of it. A house with defined rooms and doorways at the transitions gives you the freedom to choose per room without it looking like a compromise, because the doorway was always going to be there.

Neither is better. They are different constraints, and knowing which one you are working with makes the whole exercise simpler. If you are not sure, that is one of the things the free in-home measure settles.

Start with the room, then come and look

Pick the room that is bothering you most and read its page below. Then bring a cabinet door, a photo and a paint chip to the showroom at 15570 Veterans Memorial Pkwy in Wentzville, and we will put full size pieces beside them. Take the finalists home and stand them in the actual room, in daylight and again under the lamps you use at night. Two materials that seemed interchangeable in the store rarely survive that test as a tie. Hours are on the showroom page.