flooring selection in new home construction

3 years ago

Hello, on Tuesday I am going to choose flooring for my new construction home. Budget is definitely a factor, as the price of my house has escalated since initial contract (lumber costs). The standard in the house is to have LVP flooring in the foyer and kitchen/dining space, carpet in most other rooms, and I think sheet vinyl in the baths ($21/yd allowances for non LVP standard spaces). I’m going to leave carpet in the basement for now. I have around 1580 sq ft on the main level including the foyer and mud/laundry room and was hoping to keep the floor upgrade costs to $4500 or less (which might make the master bath tile not really a thing). Around 400 sq ft is LVP standard.

For whatever reason, a >$500k home is considered “budget” these days.

I have 3 cats that knock things off of tables and counters regularly and drop my darn phone about 5 times a day, and also seem to drop a lot of stuff in the kitchen in the evenings. It makes me hard on hardwood floors - I dented the ones in my old house a lot by dropping the phone. Ideally, I would like to have the same flooring through most/all of the main level. Tile would not be common in Minnesota (and is very expensive for installation to boot). I don’t usually scratch the floors, it’s all denting from dropping things or having things pushed.

I’m mostly trying to spend money on things the most difficult to replace or do later (garage insulation, cabinetry, counters, tile showers). Many of the homes are being purchased with the standard flooring and a number are upgrading to the LVP through the main level excluding the 2 main level bedrooms and baths. The flooring store offers LVP from engineered floors (triumph brand), evoke, Mohawk, paramount flooring, pergo extreme and south wind. They offer hardwoods (which I assume would cost more) from Adobe, Kenwood, mannington, mirage, Mohawk, mulligan, and paramount. They offer carpet from Engineered floors (dream weaver, and plentz), Godfrey hurst, Lexmark, Masland, Mohawk, Stanton. And they offer sheet vinyl (maybe for downstairs guest bath and laundry room) from Congolese, mannington, and Mohawk. I expect to stay in this home for at least 15 years and would ideally like to have whatever I select now for at least 5 years and would expect to replace the carpet in the downstairs before the upstairs flooring, I was hoping to upgrade the master bath to tile floors.

Appreciate any suggestions of what to avoid or suggestions on the best way to spend my relatively minimal budget. So base floors budget is $2.33 and I can spend about $3.50 over that (assuming I also upgrade a little over the standard on the LVP floors), so around $5.75/sq foot on materials?

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