Wooden floors or concrete floors? Which one should you choose? Which one is better?

The general rule of thumb is as follows. When choosing flooring option, you must take into account how much depth you have to cover with the installation of the new flooring. If it is over 1 meter, wooden floors will be cheaper and the better option. Concrete flooring is made from material extracted from natural quarries, which is a process that is very expensive and especially so as soon as you cross the 1 meter threshold. This is particularly true when you consider the amount of flooring that will be needed to cover the footprint of a large house. 

Concrete Floors

This type of flooring provides for an excellent base over which to build your house in. They have been a constant favorite among homeowners and that fact is not looking to go anywhere anytime soon. Earthquakes and other natural disasters have made engineers reevaluate their flooring methods. The methods previously employed used to be embedded foundations around the border. Nowadays, after much research, the whole of the slab is effectively floating on harfills. 

Concrete flooring also has the added quality of having thermal mass. This property helps the flooring to better retain heat that rises up from the ground. This property makes them very useful in colder climates as they will heat up the floors and can save the homeowner a fortune by using less electricity and heating. Air temperatures at night are usually much less than the temperature in the ground, wooden floors do have cooler air underneath that will cost in terms of heating loss. 

Concrete floors also have another benefit in them, which is that they are extremely quiet to walk on and they don’t creak as much as wooden floors. You have very likely experienced this and it may be safe to venture to guess that most of us do not like the annoying loud sounds that wooden floors can make when you are just walking on them. Polished Concrete Floors are also long-lasting and require very little maintenance, making them a really good choice for rooms or homes that deal with a lot of foot traffic. 

Wooden Floors

Wooden floors are another extremely popular flooring option. This is especially true among homeowners who have to contend with various types of lands over which their house is built. Mountainous regions and regions with coastal settlements calls for innovative home designs. These are areas where it is almost impossible to install concrete flooring as it is extremely difficult to make concrete floors be molded into the requirements of uneven land. 

Remote areas are also places where wooden flooring is preferred as it is a very difficult task to access these areas with transportation that is required for raw materials of concrete floors. Areas that are not easily accessible will accrue a lot of extra costs for concrete flooring. Concrete trucks can access these areas but they may have to carry much smaller loads and this factor will significantly increase the cost of installation. 

Just as long as wooden floors are properly insulated, they do make for a stylish and classic look for your flooring. Without insulation, however, these floors can get very cold. Areas prone to floods will also make homeowners in these places prefer the wooden flooring option.  

A Combination of Both

Some homeowners have been known to prefer a mix of both types of flooring. In fact, this may be the most practical option among your flooring choices when building a two storied home. In these houses with two floors, the ground floor is usually made of concrete and the upper floor is given the wooden floor treatment. 

Choosing the half concrete and half wooden flooring option may also be the preferred flooring method if only one area of the house is over uneven land. In this type of scenario, laying concrete makes the most sense for the majority of the house and using wooden flooring in the uneven part. 

Garage flooring should always be concrete

Do not, we repeat, do not use wooden flooring in your garages. If you install wooden floors in your garages, it will cost you substantially more money - particularly in maintaining the wooden floors. This is a place where cars are parked and having cars parked over wooden floors is just a straight no-no. 

If it is your heart’s deepest desire to have a wooden flooring in your garage, there is the option of using timber piles with a concrete flooring on top. This will suit your needs much better than just a straightforward wooden floor. Using a fully wooden floor is not only impractical and expensive but it will also cost you a lot of time in maintenance. Imagine having to clean up a wooden floor with tons of car wheel marks. Yes, imagine it vividly before you decide on getting wooden floors for your garage. We cannot stress enough how much better off you would be with a concrete flooring in your garage.

Both types of flooring have their own advantages and disadvantages. It is upto the individual needs of the homeowner that should make the choice of flooring apparent. But, if we had to choose one over the other, we would have to side with concrete. Unless your building site particularly demands wooden flooring, the benefits of concrete far outweighs the benefits and costs of installing and maintaining wooden floors.