Easy maintanence and child friendly Hardwood floors? - DIY Chatroom

gante · 03-10-2008, 04:14 PM

I was wondering if there is any type of hardwood floors that would be easy maintenence and child friendly and I guess what I mean by child friendly is simply that they don't scratch easily. I always wanted hardwood floors in my first home. I just purchase my first house and I will be doing a lot of remo. As I said, I always wanted hardwood floors but with a two-year-old girl, I am not sure if hardwood is the way to go. I guess the alternative would be tile.

What do you guys recomend?

KUIPORNG · 03-10-2008, 05:28 PM

poly will protect your hardwood from scatching .... I wouldn't worry too much... your daughter isn't going to handle knife/hammer/nails/...etc. types of stuff... for her to damage the floor... is quite difficult to be honest...

I found those hardwood which is prestain/poly though, seems has less poly than those hardwood where builder apply poly themselves...

curls00 · 03-11-2008, 10:04 AM

In our newer house (4 year old house, we're the 3rd owners and just moved in this past summer), we have hardwood in one of the main living rooms and dining area. It's prestain/prepoly "cherry birch" from Home Depot. Nothing too fancy, but it looks nice and so far has been really durable. We have a 2 year old who drops toys and it rarely dents, and the only time it chipped (very small) was when I was dumb enough to drop a metal shelf onto the floor (instead of putting it into the fridge, as I was aligning the fridge shelves at the time). No biggie though.

I'd say your best bet would be to try and teach your daughter to only play with soft toys, or hard toys that have dull corners, in the rooms with hardwood. Sure it won't keep 100% of the damages from happening, but a completely perfect, clean, dent/scratch-free floor is nothing more than an unhealthy obsession when you have kids.

Oh, and we have 2 cats who still have their claws and I have yet to see them scratch the floor at all.