· Michael Blair
Twenty years ago most Nashville houses had carpet in every bedroom and often the living room too. Now buyers walk in expecting hard floors throughout, and a lot of flooring quotes simply assume it. The bedrooms deserve a separate decision. They are the rooms where you are barefoot, where noise from the floor above matters most, and where the arguments against carpet, spills and traffic, are weakest. Neither answer is wrong; the question is what each one costs you in the specific room.
What carpet still does better
Warmth underfoot is the obvious one. A bedroom over a vented crawl space, which describes a large share of Middle Tennessee houses, has a cold floor from November to March, and carpet with a decent pad is the difference between stepping out of bed onto something comfortable and something that feels like tile. It also absorbs sound: footfall in an upstairs bedroom over a living room is a real complaint in two-story houses, and carpet solves it more completely than any rug.
It is also the cheaper install by a clear margin, it hides an uneven subfloor that a plank floor would telegraph, and a bedroom is the lowest-wear room in the house, so a mid-grade carpet lasts there far longer than the same product would in a hallway.
What it costs you
Carpet holds dust, dander and the pollen that Nashville spring delivers in quantity, and it holds humidity. In a bedroom that runs damp, an old carpet and pad can carry a musty smell that no cleaning removes. Anyone in the house with asthma or dust allergies does better on a hard floor with a washable rug.
It also dates. Carpet shows its age in the traffic path from the door to the bed within a decade, and at resale, a listing with carpet bedrooms is quietly marked down against one with continuous floors. Pets tip the balance further; an accident on carpet reaches the pad and often the subfloor.
- Allergies or asthma in the household: hard floor and a washable rug
- Pets that sleep in the bedroom: hard floor
- Cold floor over a crawl space, or an upstairs room over living space: carpet has the edge
- Selling within a few years: match the rest of the house
If you go hard, which hard
Bedrooms are the easiest rooms for real hardwood, because there is no water and little traffic, and a continuous hardwood floor from the hall into the bedrooms is what buyers read as quality. Luxury vinyl plank is warmer underfoot than tile and quieter than laminate, and it is the practical choice over a slab or where the budget is tight. Laminate is the least forgiving of moisture and the loudest to walk on.
Whatever the material, put an underlayment under it in an upstairs bedroom. A quality acoustic underlayment under plank flooring cuts the footfall noise transmitted to the room below, and it is very difficult to add afterward.
Making the mixed house work
A house with hard floors in the living areas and carpet in the bedrooms is normal and does not look like a compromise if the transitions are handled. The carpet should stop at the bedroom door line with a proper transition strip, the carpet color should sit in the same family as the flooring rather than fight it, and the pad should be a good one; the pad is what you feel, and it is the cheapest upgrade in the job.
If you are replacing the carpet anyway, this is the time to look at the subfloor. Squeaks, a soft spot near the bathroom door, or staining from an old pet accident are all easier to deal with while the floor is open, and they are the same problems whichever floor goes down next.