Carpet or Laminate Wood floors.....Help! [View All]

[OnionPatch]

So we've had this money saved up to do our floors. We've lived here for three years now and are only finally getting to them. If you had told me it would be three years before we had a chance to replace the flooring, I would not have moved in here! They are a horrible, gold, sculpted-shag carpet throughout, installed when the house was built in 1983. :puke: It's fraying on the edges and bleached out near the windows. I am ecstatic that we are finally going to replace the flooring.

Ok, so our house is a split-level with the living-kitchen area on the lower level and the bedrooms-bathrooms on the upper level, both levels roughly the same amount of square feet. The whole house is about 1500 sq. ft. We have enough money to install a laminate wood floor throughout if we do the labor ourselves. Or we can do the upstairs with carpeting, installed, which costs roughly the same. Our budget dictates that we have to do the work ourselves if we go with the wood floors. That's not a huge problem because my husband is a skilled carpenter and I'm a pretty good assistant. :) Still, it will be a lot of work and we're wondering if it may be too much and if we should just do the downstairs and have the bedrooms carpeted.

Resale value is a huge consideration because this home is a good chunk of our retirement fund. We will sell it in 7-12 years and move somewhere with a much lower cost of living. We want to get as much as we can from this home. So, my questions are: will laminate wood throughout the home be a bigger selling point in the future? For those of you who have installed laminate wood floors, if we choose to do the whole house are we in for a huge headache? Also, I'm wondering if real wood floors would be better but we have two big dogs and a child and this is a horse property so it's almost a small farm in a way. I'm worried real wood wouldn't hold up well.

We are going to buy the flooring today or tomorrow. I'm afraid if we put off the decision of what to do upstairs, that we will not be able to find the same wood to match if we do decide in the end to do the upstairs in laminate wood.

Any advice?