Home flooring opinions please, a fluff question

I've been agonizing over what to pick for flooring in my rather open floor plan house. Wood Look Tile has ticked all of my boxes. Thanks for mentioning it mom.

I purchased Flooret a couple years ago and we installed it ourselves. It’s beautiful and still looks new. It’s online only but you can order samples and there is a Facebook flooring group with tons of examples.

If I was building a home again, I would choose the same flooring.

We have a wood like tile and get so many compliments on it. Easy to clean, water spills don’t mess it up. Hands down, the best choice for us and our open-ish floor plan.

I’m not a fan of tile of any type too cold and hard. We have it our bathrooms and laundry room because it’s nicer looking than linoleum.

We have LVP in our new house (Shaw), we didn’t pick it though. I do love it. It’s only two years old at this point, but looks amazing. The appraiser called it hardwood in their report…we had to ask them to correct it.

I think real wood in a mid-range color (not too cool, not too warm, not too dark, and not too light) is the only truly timeless floor.

Engineered is also fine with me, as it’s still real wood, with a true wood grain, sandwiched on top of a more stable base. Just know that it can’t be refinished multiple times like full hardwood, but still usually can at least once.

I am absolutely not a fan of anything with a printed pattern that’s faux-anything, so that eliminates wood-look tile and lvps. Besides them always looking fake, my eye picks up the repeating pattern immediately and I can never unsee it. That also goes for any faux “distressing” that’s printed on a tile to make it look like it’s vintage or reclaimed.

(Tile that isn’t pretending to be wood or brick or whatever is fine.)

If you do tile, make sure to get in floor heating. It's easy and not overly expensive to have an electrician do prior to installing the tile. The warming wires are done in a pattern on a silicone pad of sorts. (I know what it looks like but can't explain it well.) Really only needed where you walk or stand. Even in warm climates it's nice. Tile is cold.

I would do tile that looks like hardwood. I feel like darker colors are classic choices that will always look nice. But they'll obviously show dust more.

I have 3 types of flooring in my house. I have tile on the first floor which functions similar to a basement (only has a small office, powder room, hallway to back yard and garage). On my stairs and up to the 2nd floor is hardwood. My chief complaint is that it has gotten extremely marred and scratched from the dog's giant claws and it's too dark for my taste. Once the dog crosses the rainbow bridge, we will refinish to a mid-toned golden color. On the 3rd floor, we have engineered wood in the aforementioned golden color. It's my favorite flooring in the whole house.

To summarize, I find the tile cold and painful to stand on for extended periods but it brightens up a normally dark space (I have a high gloss white). Hardwood is beautiful but easily damaged, warm and comfortable to stand on. Engineered wood is more resistant to scratches, warm and comfortable to stand on.

ETA: from an installation standpoint, tile was the biggest mess ever! So if you get tile and want to change it, be prepared to have a big dusty mess during demo. Our hardwood was already in the home when I bought it, but the engineered wood replaced carpet, and it was an easy peasy install.

In FL wood-look tile is popular.
It's good because if it gets wet from coming in from the pool, although it will be very slippery, it won't hurt it.
We have it in all our bedrooms and then regular 20x20 tile in the main area of the house.  

We have tile that looks like wood and love it. It is slippery if you are soaking g wet, but just damp is ok.

We just got LVP in our basement family room, laundry room and kitchen. So far I like it. I think medium browns are pretty timeless. I agonized over the decision because we also have oak trim and wanted something that looked good with it. What we ended up with works well. I also looked at laminate (We have a dog, kids, winter, etc and wanted waterproof) but eventually heard that it was not a good idea in a basement because the laminate is only waterproof from the top (not the sides) so if there is moisture coming from the concrete it can cause problems.

I would not want tile in my whole house because of the reasons mentioned--it's cold, too hard and high maintenance with grout. Also more expensive to install.

Hardwood would be great except I would worry about water damage and it's more expensive.

We need to update our upstairs flooring as well and I can't decide if I want carpet again or the same LVP that we put in elsewhere. 

We have engineered wood throughout our first floor. It was installed almost 15 yrs ago. It has been incredibly resilient through 3 medium sized dogs and 3 kids (now teens). That includes our kitchen (but not bathrooms). Our house cleaner who has been with us prior to our remodel has commented several times how well our floors have held up.

100% this! We have in floor heat under the tiled floors in our kitchen, mudroom, hallway, main floor bath and laundry room at home. It was put in when the kitchen and that half of the house was remodeled in 2000. Yes it’s hard but it’s not cold at all. We like it.

We installed five different types of flooring when we rebuilt our cabin in 2019. For most of the main floor there we installed LVP that we got cheap from a building materials outlet place. We tiled the main floor bathroom. We reinstalled the manufactured laminate wood flooring that we pulled up from the basement when we tore the old cabin down. The contractor took it up and stored it while everything was exposed to the elements over the winter and we put it back in after the house was rebuilt in the spring. We were pretty surprised that it went back in as well as it did. In our new basement guest room, we installed manufactured laminate that we had bought from Costco years prior but never put in. For the utility room, we used sheet vinyl which was similar to what had been installed in the basement bathroom previously.

Of all of these, my favorite was the manufactured laminate wood from Costco. It went in the easiest, looks the nicest and feels the best underfoot. The tile looks nice but we didn’t do in floor heat there because it’s such a small space. The LVP has been the most disappointing because there are places where it has come apart on the ends and it’s very hard to knock that one strip back in once the rest of the flooring is already installed. There are a couple other spots where corners got chipped when something got dropped on it or something of that nature happened. In hindsight, I wouldn’t choose that type of flooring again for such a high traffic area.

Last summer we purchased more of the Mohawk manufactured flooring from Costco to do our main floor family room and formal living room but we haven’t been able to put it in yet. Those rooms are currently carpeted but the carpet in both rooms has been trashed by our dogs so we wanted something more durable that would hold up better to the abuse it gets. We bought what we thought was better quality manufactured laminate for our DD’s room from Home Depot when we tore out her carpet last year. It was so much more difficult to install than the Mohawk was at the lake cabin, so that really weighed heavily on our decision since we knew we would be installing it ourselves.

Whether you are installing yourself or hiring it done is a big factor in what you ultimately choose. 

We put a wood look porcelain tile in almost 10 years ago and we LOVE it! We have a pool so we wanted something that could get wet and was durable. It is not slippery at all and looks perfect. We get so many compliments on it!! I would do it all over again!  It is very easy to clean and doesn't take anything special.  We just mop, sweep and vacuum and it looks exactly as it did the day we installed it.  We do have several area rugs in different rooms, but we love the floor!!