You have someone whos going to get you a great deal, not only on the wood, but probably the install too. someone you trust!

you can always put a rug down to get that feel for carpet. But i agree with your father, that you will regret putting carpet in once it becomes worn

Another vote for hardwood. I agree with Unique Wood, the beauty of hardwood flooring is unmatched. We find our site-finished hardwood is beautiful and warm. We don't have pets right now but I also find it so much easier to clean than our carpets, I can swiffer all the way to the baseboards and know that it's clean.

Thank you so much for the detailed responses. My husband is now leaning hardwood, but my gut says carpet because of how I felt about our last house. If I didn't care about resale or popularity, I would go with carpet in a second and sacrifice the look. But I do care...so I'm still torn!

" And the tumbleweeds drove me crazy. Those joyous wafting clumps of cat hair from one cat after a couple days of not swiffering....." - just the thought of living with pet hairs hidden in carpet is enough for 'hardwood floor' decision. To me, it is a healthier, cleaner choice for living environment.

Well, I'm a HW fan but we have more handmade rugs than we do rooms, LOL.

HW is a better seller, but you need a top-quality finish on it, such as Bona or Swedish. Refinishing HW can be almost as expensive as new W2W (and you have to move furniture out for either).

Carpet HIDES dust/hair better, but a lot of dirt filters down through it. You are right that it's a lot 'cozier', though. We have a downstairs Master suite and it is the coldest room in the house. We did put in W2W for that 'comfort factor.'

However, that was 25 yrs ago. The carpet's disgusting now--permanently stained, flattened nap. My allergies have gotten worse over the years, and I suspect the carpet isn't helping the issue no matter how often it's vacuumed.

We have the original red oak flooring upstairs from 1940 in the LR/DR/frt bdrm,. It was refinished with oil-based polyurethane in 1990 (good water-based poly wasn't on the market yet). It is still in beautiful condition and ridiculously easy to maintain.

That said, I think it's clear your heart belongs to W2W. Even if you eventually sell your home, it isn't a given that HW floors are a guaranteed "sell". HW is nice, people love and appreciate it, but if other factors are positive for your home - layout, location, cleanliness, good maintenance - your home will sell even with W2W.

So unless you absolutely know you are going to sell your home by a specific time, go with what you love.

Well, we're going to continue the hardwood into the great room, and we're going with 4" planks, not 3 1/4". We're getting such a good deal and I think carpeting would make the space too choppy and dated. I plan to buy a 12x15 rug with a nice thick plush pad underneath, so hopefully it will still feel cozy. I realized we've been living with this disgusting beaten down hard berber for a few years and so any pile rug I buy will be considerably more plush and cozy anyway. If not, we can always put carpeting down, but the reverse is almost impossible.

So now I'm trying to figure out what color stain. I planned on jacobean from day one and now I'm wondering if we should go lighter. We've lived with all this light/white in here for so long, I'm afraid the darker stain might be too drastic of a change. I am not good at these decisions!

Thanks everyone for your input. It was very helpful.

Be aware that the darker stains show dust/hair MUCH MORE than the light or medium-toned stains. Most say they have to mop on a daily basis to keep it looking nice. Swiffer is their BFF, lol.

As someone allergic to animals and especially cats, if I were viewing your home to buy, I would probably be ok with considering a home with hardwood floors but if the flooring were carpet, no because the dander will never leave a carpet.

My first two homes I bought both had wall to wall carpeting, OVER hardwood floors. We had the carpet removed before we moved in and then had the floors cleaned. Hence I suffered no ill effects.

Carpeting is not nearly as clean as hardwood either. I don't care how often your vacuum.

Put down the hardwood flooring and then get a large carpet remnant if that's the look you like. Make it the full width of the area you want to cover.

Sorry I posted the above without reading through first. :) Glad you decided on the HW.

Don't go with a very dark stain. We have a dark stain and it shows every speck of dust and paw print. (I have a hairless dog.)

While I personally LOVE dark stained floors, in my next house I'm going to opt for a medium colored stain so that I still get that pop of darker value but not so dark that everything shows. I'm also going next time for a slightly busier wood to help hide things too.

To the OP,

When we replaced carpet with hardwood floor in my study, I put various hardwood floor samples in the room for a couple of days so that we could see actual color under different "light", natural and artificial, throughout the day. It was an enlightening experience when observing the differences especially these from samples look very similar to one another.

More interesting is the final hardwood floor color we picked is very close to the color of the replaced carpet but once the floor was installed, the entire room is so much brighter and cheerful.

The only extra work of having wood floor is that we put pads on the surfaces of each items/furniture that touch the floor to avoid potential scratches and damages. Not bad at all as we only need to do that once.

We like clean, modern look for the study. The floor we picked is light color maple with minimum pattern that match the built in furniture beautifully. We purchased extra flooring so the contractor could eliminate the ones with busier pattern. The entire room is easy to clean, soothing and calm that makes us very happy.