Go real wood instead of faux. For the whole house.

Tile would probably *look* best, but it's wearing on your joints. I need to wear shoes indoors while we are at our fully tiled winter home. Here in Chicagoland I have medium stained oak flooring throughout and can go barefoot without hurting. (If you must lay flooring flat on cement, no benefit to wood.)

I would love to go with real hard wood flooring throughout the house but can't afford that now.

I do like the look of tile but wondered about the aching joints. Everyone in this house likes to go bare foot. With the kids they are always dropping and spilling something not that they have glass but wonder if tile with young kids is a mistake?

We put our ceramic tile floors in our kitchen when our kids were 6 and 10 yo. Yes, we had lots of spills when the kids were little and the ceramic is super easy to keep clean. I would do ceramic again in a heartbeat and we're now in our early 60's. Our floor is almost 20 yo and still going strong.

If I lived in a cold climate, I would be inclined to put the electric radiant heating elements under the tile in the walkway areas especially if I had little ones running around in bare feet. Its not that expensive anymore. But cold floors are a non-issue here in the south.

We have mostly wood floors and a little bit of carpet in the rest of the house and honestly, I don't notice any difference with aching joints. If they ache, they ache. Doesn't matter if I"m standing on wood, ceramic, asphalt, or grass. But that's another subject for another day.

Lots of people like wood floors in their kitchen. We're just too messy and I like to know that the floor is clean. It's a personal thing- I prefer ceramic. This subject has been discussed a lot on this site if you do a search. There are pros and cons to each type of flooring.

We put heart pine in our living and dining rooms years ago then 8 years later decided the tile in the kitchen was just too hard on our legs so we put heart pine there too. The installers just screened the adjoining wood floors and then sealed it all in poly. I find it far easier to clean than dealing with grout. At first you could see the line where the new wood had been installed but over time the wood subtly changes color and no one would ever guess now that it had been installed at two different times. Just saying you could do some wood now and more later as the budget allows.

Would anyone do a new hardwood floor on the kitchen & DR floor even if can't afford to do rest of the house right now? The other floors have the laminate wood.