I just replaced the flooring in my home – these are the 5 decisions I instantly regret (and won’t ever make again)

As Ideal Home’s resident floorcare expert, I’d like to think that I know my stuff when it comes to flooring. But there’s a big difference between knowing your laminate from your engineered wood to actually choosing the flooring that suits your home, needs and budget. And after recently replacing the flooring in my home, I’m not ashamed to admit that I made some mistakes.

For context, I decided to replace the flooring in my three-bedroom terraced home because we’re planning on moving in the next year, and I knew that our old, worn-down laminate was a flooring choice that would make it harder to sell our home. And if we can increase the value of our home by up to 5% by spending a couple of thousand pounds, I figured it was worth it.

And while I’m generally happy with the overall look of our new carpet and hard flooring, there are some niggles that irk me every day - and my own decisions caused all of them. So, these are the things I wish I'd done differently when replacing the floor in my home.

1. Not taking samples home

I’ll be the first to admit that when I get my sights set on an idea, like replacing the flooring in my home, I need to put that plan into action immediately. Unfortunately, my husband is the same, so we bought our new living room flooring (and dining room flooring) in the first shop we went into.

In our defence, we had already done some online research and knew that this shop was not only one of the cheapest places around, but also had the widest selection, so we were already 99% certain we’d be able to find exactly what we wanted. However, I wish we had taken a bit more time to think about our decision and take some samples home with us.

That’s because carpet and flooring showrooms are typically lit with bright, artificial lighting that isn’t as natural as the ever-changing light in real homes. This meant that the hard flooring we chose in the shop looked very different to how it now looks in our house. And while I don’t dislike it, it’s not quite the colour we had imagined.

In fact, the colour is a little darker than we were intending, and as we wanted to choose a lighter colour to make our small living room look bigger, the overall result is a little ‘cosier’ than we would have liked. So, next time I’ll make sure we take samples home and live with them for a few days, as places like Tapi Carpets and B&Q are more than happy for you to order samples from them.

2. Choosing textured carpet

Our budget didn’t allow for us to replace our entire home’s flooring in one fell swoop, so we did it in two chunks. And while we replaced the hard flooring a couple of weeks ago, we actually replaced the carpet upstairs a year ago, as it was in dire need of some TLC.

Before we replaced it, our old carpet was a short-pile cream coloured carpet that was incredibly worn down, faded, stained, and (strangely) very bubbly in place. And although we managed to live with it for a couple of years, getting it ripped out and replaced was well worth the money. However, we undoubtedly replaced it with the wrong thing.

This was all my fault, as I was the one who ultimately wanted textured carpet, as I think it looks so much better than low-pile carpet. And while I love how it looks in our home, choosing a natural wool carpet was a bad decision. That's because textured carpet (especially wool) is a nightmare to clean.

With so many loops and weaves, it’s easy for dust, dirt, and debris to get caught within the fibres. And although I own a high-powered vacuum - the Dyson Gen5detect Cordless Vacuum (£749 at Dyson) - I think even that struggles to get deep into the fibres. Plus, the VAX Platinum SmartWash Pet-Design Carpet Washer is the only carpet cleaner we’ve tested that can be used on wool. Most other carpet cleaners can’t be used at all, which limits how we can maintain it.

3. Not going bold enough

As we only plan on living in this house for the next year (or hopefully even less), we knew that we weren’t technically buying our new flooring for ourselves, and this impacted our buying decision massively. Still, I regret not going bolder with our flooring choice downstairs.

We swapped a very old, worn-out laminate flooring for a wood-effect laminate flooring that you’d easily mistake for real wood (or at least engineered wood) if you didn’t get too up close and personal. We also went for a middle-of-the-pack price range and a flooring type that was ultimately laid in vertical planks to elongate the length of the room.

And while this works to help sell the house, I do wish we’d gone bolder as, ultimately, we still need to enjoy the time we have left in this house - and we haven’t even put the house on the market yet, so we don’t know exactly how long it’ll take to sell or how long it’ll take us to find a new place.

If I had gotten out of my own head and bought the flooring for us rather than for the next owners, I would have definitely gone for something a little more exciting. I’ve always wanted to install herringbone flooring like this Signature Collection Select Oak Herringbone (££86.06 per m² at B&Q), but I guess I’ll have to leave that for my next house.

4. Keeping the old skirting boards

I live in a very higgledy-piggledy house that’s a mixture of original Victorian features and a botched ‘80s extension that gives me more grey hairs than I’d like to admit. One of the many downsides of this is that our skirting boards are all different (seriously, every skirting board downstairs is a different style). Not to mention, they’re very old, scuffed, and in need of replacement.

However, replacing skirting boards isn’t a small or cheap job, and we knew we’d run the risk of potentially having to re-plaster the walls if something went wrong. So, we opted to simply paint our mismatching skirting boards when we got our new hard flooring installed - and this is another decision I regret.

Although our newly-painted skirting boards do look better than they did thanks to The ONE All-In-One Paint & Primer (£13.50 at Amazon) that we used, the house still looks a bit mismatched, and the flooring trim that we had to pay extra for does make the perimeter of our downstairs rooms look very bulky and cluttered. They’re also difficult to clean, as dust gets stuck in the little ridges.

If we had replaced the skirting boards at the same time, however, we could have foregone the trim and hidden the edges of the flooring underneath the new ones instead to create a more seamless perimeter. Alas, we didn’t.

5. Not replacing the subfloor

As I mentioned, we live in a home built in 1901, and a lot of the original features still exist today - including many of the original floorboards, which also serve as our subfloor. This is quite common in older properties, but at some point, a couple of the original floorboards had been replaced with new ones.

While you’d think this was a good thing, the combination of old, wobbly floorboards with sturdier, modern floorboards resulted in an uneven subfloor that isn’t ideal for laying new flooring. In fact, as soon as the fitters turned up and looked at the floor, they warned me that the end result might not be as we’d hoped, as they were trying to lay flat planks on a not-so-flat surface.

While the end result isn’t awful, there are a few areas that sound a little hollow when you walk over it - especially downstairs. And, again, this was fully our fault. In fact, the shop assistant asked us multiple times if we wanted to replace our subfloor as part of our quote, as it would offer the best results.

We did second-guess ourselves when my husband ripped up the old floor himself (saving us a considerable amount of money as we didn’t have to pay extra for the fitters to remove and dispose of it). But as we were on a budget and didn’t want to pay more for extras we didn’t think we needed, we decided against it. Again, this was a mistake we wouldn't make again.

While making these mistakes has been annoying, I've learnt a lot from replacing the flooring in my home - and I definitely won't make them again!