When thinking about design options for your new home, making a decision about flooring can become a huge deal. To make the best decision for you and your family, take a look at a few of flooring’s pros and cons concerning hardwood versus carpet flooring. After all, information is always the best remedy to indecision.

Hardwood Pros: Hardwood has steadily risen in popularity over the past few years in new homes. The rich appearance of wood can easily dress-up any space, providing an elegant environment in every room. Cleaning finished hardwood can be accomplished easily with products such as Swiffer dusters, and even spills can be easily removed. Hardwood floors that do incur damage, such as scratches, can also be refinished instead of needing to be replaced. Better yet, hardwood flooring tends to add to a home’s resale value.

Hardwood Cons: If your home is located in an area that has high humidity, the hardwood floors could expand and buckle against your home’s walls. Also, while spills are easy to clean off of hardwood, a consistent ‘attack’ on your floors caused from pet messes can eventually discolor or cause a permanent odor in corners of your home, requiring new flooring to be put in.

Carpet Pros: The softer, warmer and quieter option many home owners go with in flooring a home is still carpet. Carpet in a home can be used to add to a home’s décor, color scheme and overall warmth. The varied textures, colors, fibers, patterns, styles, etc. allow for carpet to be a real contender to hardwood. Specific brands of carpet even offer buyers performance features of their products, giving home buyers a reasonable estimate to how long the carpet could last and when it should be replaced.

Carpet Cons: There are typically three main cons to carpeting: color, wear and dirt. Sometimes home owners purchase a trendy color of carpet to go with their current décor, but those colors change with the season and aren’t always the best when it comes to reselling homes. Also, the basic wear and tear of carpet can be problematic in high traffic areas, causing the need for replacement sometimes sooner than most would prefer it. Finally, dirt and stains can be a challenge when tasked with removing them from the thousands of tiny fibers that make up the carpet, which make cleaning up pet hair, spills and everyday dust an issue.

This great information is provided by Atlanta Real Estate Forum.