What kind of floor do you have?

[Lady Henevere]

We have old hardwood upstairs that was under the carpet we pulled out a few years after we bought this house. It's stained and ugly in places, but it's better than the icky carpet we had before. It does require a fair amount of dust bunny maintenance, but nothing a swiffer-type thing can't handle easily. (We got a sweeper with a replaceable terrycloth cover - like a swiffer but you don't have to keep buying the cloths, you just throw the cover in the washer.)

Downstairs we recently installed a woven bamboo floating floor -- I love it, it's supposed to be good with moisture (we have a dry climate though, so I can't say for sure), it's very hard and resists scratches, and everyone who walks in says it's gorgeous. It's over a concrete subfloor with a moisture barrier and a thin layer of cork. We've had it a few months now and so far I'm very pleased with it. Here it is freshly installed (baseboards weren't in yet):

 

[SKR8PN]

Lady Henevere, your floors look GREAT!! Our hardwood was also hidden under some NASTY carpet, but that went away the first month I lived here. They had installed the hardwood when they built the house, but never put a finish on them!! Just carpeted right over top of the bare wood!

 

[ohiofarmgirl]

we put hardwood bamboo in the kitchen and we LOVE it..no really, we LOVE IT.

and i did it all myself. me. alone. (well the dog helped)

we used a floor nailer. the only drawback is that its a little spendy. but so far so good. even with all these cats, dogs, and me its held up really really well.

we will eventually rip all this stupid carpet out. we could immediately do that click together 'wood' stuff - which would be good and cheap. but i'd wouldnt hesitate to do bamboo for most of the house.

 

[Farmfresh]

We have hardwood primarily with some tile. I agree about the bamboo and "rain forest woods" they will do great in a humid area. You will have FAR less problems with a narrower plank and a "floating" floor that is tongue and grove but not secured down or at the edges. This gives the floor some where to go as humidity rises and falls.

That said our floors are oak hardwood and nailed down in the old fashioned way. My house is over 80 years old and Missouri is no stranger to high humidity conditions since much of our summer we are at 80 percent humidity or higher! This is followed by fairly low humidity in the wintertime. My floors swell and shrink quite regularly. In the summer they are almost quiet since they are swollen together and very squeaky in the winter. Like I said they have worked here for 80 years. Something a laminate could only dream of.

 

[Kim_NC]

Have you checked under the carpets? We had nasty, dirty "champagne" carpet in the upstairs of the farmhouse when we bought the place. Here's a pic:

We ripped up the carpet - really, it was so ugly and dirty I figured even bare subfloor would be better. And waalaaa...unfinished original hardwood underneath, as SKR8PN describes!

Here it is with nothing more than a good mopping and wood stain added. It came out dark due to the age of the wood, but I'm happy. It's now part of the guest suite:

And on laminate...
Here's a pic showing our kitchen floor redone in Prego. (Was taken of the cookstove, but shows the floor well enough.) This is the 2nd home where we replaced the kitchen floor with laminate. Very easy to clean and looks natural enough in the right 'colors':

 

[Farmfresh]

Love that wood stove!!

 

[lupinfarm]

Awesome woodstove! Unfortunately we're probably getting a regular ole' woodstove lol.

This is the original spruce 6" planks from when the house was built in the mid 1800s.. Don't mind the saddle lol, I was taking a photo of it but you can see the wood floors.

The floors aren't in good enough condition to restore and we're flooring over them with the middle sample here... this is Birch, though if the birch is out of stock we're fine with either the Oak (on the left) or the Hickory (on the right).

We get pretty humid here in the summertime, and we don't have A/C (though someone spoke of getting a window A/C unit for the upstairs lol).

This is the flooring in the other side of the upstairs which includes my brothers bedroom, the dormer window, and much of the hallway.

Excuse the table and junk LOL I was selling/getting rid of that table, the floor in this half is in really bad condition, it's Maple and is unfinished. We aren't lucky enough to find nice hardwood!

And for those of you talking about laminate. The big thing you need to look at when you go for laminate flooring is the Millimetres of "wood" on top. This floor was 8MM which was the most you could buy at the time, but that was a heck of a lot more than the 5MM they had in home depot. Buy high quality, not for the low price. This stuff can get just as expensive if not more expensive than hardwood flooring, and it is AWFUL to put down.

The stairs..

And an overview of it from the stairs across the living room

We had the laminate in all the bedrooms plus the office, dining room, and living room. Tile in the kitchen and bathrooms, carpet tile in the family room.

 

[SKR8PN]

My cousin has a log cabin, and built a log cabin addition onto it. He had a lot of old growth Hickory trees cut down to built his addition. He had them milled into flooring for the cabin. It is STUNNING!!

 

[ScottSD]

Upstairs I put in a maple floor that I took out of an old school. I had to plane it down and re-route a lot of the edges.

On the main floor, I put in a red oak floor, but in the dining area I put in ceramic tile:

 

[SKR8PN]

Scott.....those floors are beautiful!!