Hardwood Flooring Room Inspiration Guide

The kitchen is the hub of your home, where you cook meals and gather for parties. Kitchen floors must withstand frequent foot traffic, dropped dishes and utensils, and spills galore. But because they’re the room you’ll likely spend the most time in, they must also indulge your craving for great style.

Many people prefer hardwood flooring for kitchens, for its enduring beauty and the value it adds to a home. Wood flooring is especially popular in homes with open floor plans because it flows gracefully from room to room and has the versatility to meet the decorating demands of your living, dining and kitchen areas. In the past you would need to be careful if you installed solid wood or engineered hardwood, needing to wipe up spills quickly; however, new innovations have resulted in waterproof hardwood flooring. Hartco® HydroBlok™ features all the benefits of a beautiful hardwood floor, but is completely protected from the issues with water or spills.

Whether you call it a living room or a family room, its purpose is clear: this is a space for relaxing, putting up your feet, hanging with family and friends. It gets a lot of love, so not only should this room reflect your unique style, it should be a place of welcome and warmth that will keep looking beautiful after years and years of use.

What kind of flooring is best for family rooms and living rooms?

Your home’s overall style, the location of your living room, and whether or not you are doing the install yourself will have a lot of influence as you explore living room and family room flooring ideas.

Because of its timelessness, hardwood flooring is an ideal choice for living rooms. Even if your decor changes over time, wood flooring stays in style and always conveys a sense of warmth. Solid hardwood in particular is prized for its enduring beauty and the value it brings to your home.

Engineered hardwood is a great alternative to solid if your family room is in a finished basement, or if you need to install over concrete slab or a radiant heating system. With its floating wood floor installation, it can be an easy install for an experienced DIYer.

Hardwood Flooring Room Guide

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  Room Inspiration|

The bedroom is where the day’s stress dissolves, where you find much-needed R&R before starting fresh again tomorrow. How relaxing your bedroom feels isn’t just about the softness of the bed. Does the decor calm you? Does it reflect your personal design aesthetic?

Too often, the bedroom is pushed to the bottom of the decorating to-do list, but a well designed one can really feel like a retreat.

What kind of flooring is best for bedrooms?

As in many rooms, a lot of a bedroom’s energy — its overall feel — comes from the flooring. The way it feels when you walk on it, the sense of openness or coziness it creates, the style it conveys.

For good reasons, solid hardwood flooring continues to be the preferred choice for bedrooms. It’s timeless, providing a beautiful backdrop for any wall color, bedding, furnishing or area rug. It offers endless style opportunities to bring warmth with a personal touch. And, it will add a lifetime of value, stability and beauty to your home.

You can also achieve the hardwood look with engineered hardwood flooring, which is DIY-friendly and can be used for challenging installations, like basement-level bedrooms or over radiant heat.

For many homeowners, the basement isn’t just for storage. It’s the family room, the play room, the home gym — a frequently enjoyed living space that deserves attention to great design, just like the rest of the house. The challenge with rooms that are below grade (underground) is that they are subject to environmental concerns like moisture and humidity that can damage certain floors.

For this reason, engineered hardwood flooring is the only type of hardwood recommended for basements. With a wide range of styles available in real engineered hardwood, almost any basement flooring idea you can imagine can be brought to life in your basement.

The dining room functions differently for different people. For some, it’s a place for daily family meals and homework. For others it’s a room that sees most of its action during holidays or dinner parties. Either way, dropped food, spilled drinks and heavy chairs are inevitable. And both style and durability are a must.

What kind of flooring is best for dining rooms?

Dining rooms are often adjacent to living rooms and kitchens, and flooring flows from one room to the next. Solid hardwood flooring is a perfect option to create a timeless and beautiful look that suits the demands of all your main-level living areas. It’s easy to clean, and many collections come with a premium protective finish that resists scratches, stains and spills for life. Of course, it’s always smart to put felt padding on your chair and table legs to reduce the potential for scrapes and gouges, and to wipe up spills quickly.

Similarly, engineered hardwood flooring offers gorgeous style and long-lasting durability.

Which might be the best dining room floor for you? It really depends on your budget and whether you have any enhanced durability needs.

Your foyer is the entryway to your home, your first opportunity to make an impression to front-door guests. But it needs to do more than introduce your family’s unique style. It needs to be durable enough to remain beautiful for years to come, even with all the foot traffic, outside dirt and wet umbrellas that cross your threshold.

It’s a similar story with hallways, some of which are extensions of your foyer and may feature the same flooring. With the constant back and forth, hallways take on the brunt of the traffic in your home — and get a lot of visibility.

What kind of flooring is best for foyers and hallways?

Solid hardwood is a great option. Not only is it a breeze to keep clean, but its timeless beauty and quality craftsmanship will endure for many years to come and add value to your home.

Another top recommendation for foyers and hallways is engineered hardwood flooring. It offers the perfect combination of durability and ageless style that’s needed for these frequently used spaces.